The jury on Monday (August 31) found Duane Davis, a former Los Angeles gang member, guilty of the murder of Tupac Shakur in 1996, despite the defense’s insistence that there was no physical evidence.
Thirty years after the never-solved death of the rap legend, this former figure of the South Side Compton Crips, a gang from a sensitive area of Los Angeles, was tried for having ordered the murder and providing the murder weapon.
After deliberating for only a few hours, the jury found him guilty of “first degree murder with use of a deadly weapon.” Sentencing will take place on October 13.
Speaking to Judge Carli Kierny after the verdict was announced, Duane Davis said in the courtroom that he wanted to appeal the decision. During the last act of this trial, the final arguments of the prosecution and the defense lasted almost five hours.
In his indictment, prosecutor Binu Palal, representing the state of Nevada (southwest), hammered home the prosecution’s thesis according to which a cycle of vendetta had been initiated in retaliation for the beating of Duane Davis’ nephew, Orlando Anderson, in which Tupac Shakur had participated.
Duane Davis faces irreducible life imprisonment
The accused, whom he described on multiple occasions as a “shot caller” whose orders were obeyed by members of the Crips (“shot caller” in English), faces an irreducible life sentence.
The dispute pitted two music labels, Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, each using a rival gang to protect its artists, against the backdrop of the war between the Crips and Bloods gangs in Los Angeles, which peaked in the 1990s.
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“Duane Davis, in gang culture, couldn’t let that go,” said Binu Palal, referring to the public humiliation of his nephew hours before the shooting of Tupac Shakur. “He obtained the gun, he organized the group, he gave chase to Mr. Shakur,” he listed, insisting on the premeditated nature, according to him, of the actions of the accused, a former drug trafficker, and retaining his own statements against him.
As early as 2008, Duane Davis admitted to investigators that he was in the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired. But his confidences taking place within the framework of an agreement providing for partial immunity, they could not be held against him.
Then the ex-gang member spoke out in the media, before publishing a compromising memoir in 2019. He says in particular that he was in the passenger seat, and passed the gun to the occupants of the rear seat, without revealing the identity of the shooter.
Neither the Cadillac nor the murder weapon were ever found
Arrested in September 2023 following this publication, Duane Davis, who pleads not guilty, now assures that his book was fictionalized by his co-author, and that he was in Los Angeles on the evening of the murder.
“For nearly 18 years, Duane Davis told police, on television, in books, and to YouTube interviewers, to anyone who would listen, that he was responsible for the murder of Tupac Shakur. Tell him you heard it by finding him guilty,” the prosecutor told jurors.
But defense lawyer Michael Sanft dismissed the statements as “just words,” saying his client was seeking to promote sales of his memoirs purely for financial gain. “You are reading a book that is fiction and not fact, but the prosecution wants you to believe that it is in some way a confession that he was there at the time of the shooting,” he pleaded, emphasizing the absence of material evidence.
Neither the Cadillac nor the murder weapon were ever found. “With all the instruments available to the police, they have nothing in this file that shows that this man was in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996,” continued Michael Sanft.
That night, shots from a white Cadillac injured Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, after he had just attended a Mike Tyson boxing match. The rapper died six days later, at the age of 25.
With AFP
