Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the man convicted of murdering Tupac Shakur, was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison Tuesday (Oct. 13) for orchestrating the 1996 killing of the rap legend.
Davis, 63, was found guilty in August of masterminding the Las Vegas drive-by shooting that left the iconic rapper dead at the age of 25. Prosecutors say the former Los Angeles gang leader ordered the killing in revenge for Tupac beating up his nephew — and then repeatedly admitted it in the years after.
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At a court hearing Tuesday (Oct. 13), Judge Carli Kierny sentenced Davis to 40 years to life in prison for that crime, telling him, as Shakur’s family looked on, that “the world never forgot about Tupac” and that he must pay for his killing.
“You don’t get to take a man from his family, you don’t get to take his very life, his whole future from him and just walk away from it. Especially when that man is Tupac Shakur,” the judge said. “It took us 30 years, but at this time you are going to face justice for what you did on Sept. 7, 1996.”
The sentence came after members of Shakur’s family had testified to the harm the killing had caused them: “That day, the loss of Tupac, for a long time, crippled my entire family emotionally and mentally,” said Sekyiwa Shakur, the late artist’s sister. “I miss my brother. I do, I do, I do.”
Shakur, then a rising superstar in the rap world, was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting following a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas. His death, which came amid the infamous East Coast-West Coast hip-hop feud, was followed months later by the shooting of rival The Notorious B.I.G. No one was charged with either killing, and the pair of cold cases became a fixture in American cultural history.
But in September 2023, prosecutors finally unveiled a murder indictment against Davis, a Crips gang leader in 1990s Los Angeles, claiming he had ordered the killing as revenge after Shakur’s entourage beat up his nephew earlier that night — part of a long-running local gang beef that had come to overlap with the East-West music rivalry.
In bringing that case, prosecutors relied primarily on Davis’ own words as evidence, including a 2019 tell-all memoir and podcast interviews in which he candidly described his role in the famous crime. Davis’ defense attorneys argued that those statements were essentially just fictional, aimed at helping to boost his notoriety and sell books.
Across two weeks of trial, prosecutors called 24 witnesses and played more than eight hours of recordings, mostly of Davis himself discussing his role in the killing. Defense attorney Michael Sanft presented only a brief defense, but told jurors that prosecutors had failed to present any hard proof tying his client to the shooting.
When the jury began to deliberate, it took just a few hours for them to find Davis guilty of murder. He has vowed to appeal the verdict, a process that could take years to reach a final decision.
At Tuesday’s hearing, prosecutors urged the judge to impose a harsh sentence, telling her that Davis had caused a “uniquely painful situation for this family.”
“It is unique in the criminal justice system for somebody like Mr. Davis to inflict continued punishment … by publicly grandstanding in the death of Tupac Shakur,” one prosecutor told the judge, urging the “maximum possible sentence.”