Tupac's Killer Gets 40 Years to Life. His Own Bragging Convicted Him.
Duane "Keffe D" Davis, the only person convicted in Tupac Shakur's 1996 killing, was sentenced to 40 years to life. He says he will appeal.
Thirty years after Tupac Shakur was shot on a Las Vegas street, the only man convicted in his killing is going to prison for the rest of his life, or close to it.
Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny sentenced Duane "Keffe D" Davis on Tuesday to 40 years to life, NBC News and the Los Angeles Times reported. Davis, 63, was convicted of murder with use of a deadly weapon for orchestrating the drive-by shooting on Sept. 7, 1996. The Times reported the sentence is two consecutive terms of 20 years to life.
"You don't get to take a man from his family," Kierny told him from the bench.
Convicted by his own words
Davis did not fire the gun. Prosecutors argued he was the shot caller for a Compton Crips gang who supplied the weapon and helped set the attack in motion after Shakur, record executive Marion "Suge" Knight and others beat Davis' nephew, Orlando Anderson, at the MGM Grand hours earlier. Knight was wounded in the car with Shakur and survived. Shakur, 25, died six days later.
The case sat cold for decades. What broke it open was Davis himself. In a secret 2008 interview with police, given in exchange for protection from prosecution, he described his role. Then he kept talking, in media interviews and in a 2019 memoir, "Compton Street Legend." The BBC reported that the book and interviews voided his protective agreement, and a judge allowed the 2008 interview into evidence.
His defense told jurors the stories were bravado and fiction meant to sell books. The jury did not buy it. NBC reported they took less than three hours to convict.
"One thing I believe is that [Davis] did not know that murder did not have a statute of limitations," journalist Cathy Scott, who covered the killing in the 1990s, told the BBC.
A family's long wait
Shakur's sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, spoke at the hearing. "The loss of Tupac, for a long time, crippled my family," she said, according to the BBC. In her statement she also called her brother "a father figure to me," NBC reported. She and her brother Maurice Shakur both asked for the maximum sentence.
Davis declined to address the family. Asked if he had anything to say, he answered, "I'm good. I'm gonna appeal this case for sure," the BBC reported.
Anderson, the nephew prosecutors said fired the shots, was killed in an unrelated shooting in 1998. He had denied involvement.
Be sure your sin will find you out
There is an old warning in Numbers 32:23: "be sure your sin will find you out." Davis spent years treating a man's death as a story to sell. He bragged about it on camera and put it between book covers. The bragging is what convicted him. Prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo told the court Davis spent years "publicly grandstanding," according to the BBC.
That should land with a culture that has spent three decades turning the Shakur killing into entertainment, feeding conspiracy theories and true-crime fascination. Behind the legend was a 25-year-old son and brother bleeding out in a car. A real family buried him. The judge was right to remind everyone of that.
It is also worth noticing what justice looked like here. It took far too long. Investigators at the time blamed Shakur's own associates for stymying their work, and prosecutors said police failed to connect the dots among known gang leaders, NBC reported. But when the case finally came to court, it went through the ordinary process: evidence, a defense, a jury, a sentence and now an appeal. Dock Line made a similar point this week about Fort Hood. Justice should be done soberly, not turned into a show.
Davis will appeal, as is his right. Unless that appeal succeeds, a man who once sold his story will spend his remaining years living with how it ends.
Hero photo: Dietmar Rabich via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped and resized.
