Thirty years after Tupac's murder, his killer was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in prison

Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former figure in a Los Angeles gang, was sentenced Tuesday to a minimum of 40 years in prison for ordering the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur.

Thirty years after the death of the American rap legend, the American justice system has convicted his murderer. Duane "Keffe D" Davis was sentenced on Tuesday, October 13, to a minimum of 40 years in prison for ordering the murder of Tupac Shakur. A former member of the South Side Compton Crips (a gang from a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles), he had been found guilty at the end of August.

For three weeks, the trial dissected the gang revenge that proved fatal to Tupac Shakur on the night of September 7, 1996, as drawn from the memoirs of Duane Davis.

Even before the sentence was handed down, Duane Davis's lawyer, Michael Sanft, announced that they would "appeal this decision".

"You don't have the right to tear a man away from his family. You don't have the right to take his life, steal his entire future, and then get away with it. Especially when that man is named Tupac Shakur," Judge Carli Kierny insisted, as she pronounced the sentence.

"It took us 30 years, but today you will answer for your actions," she added.

According to the prosecution, Duane Davis orchestrated the rapper's murder to avenge the beating of his nephew Orlando Anderson, in which Tupac had participated a few hours earlier, after attending a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas.

The world of gangs and American rap

At the time, the American rap scene was cutthroat and Tupac, author of the hits "California Love" and "All Eyez on Me", was the leading figure of Californian hip-hop.

The West Coast label Death Row Records, where Tupac worked, was the sworn enemy of the New York record company Bad Boy Records, founded by P. Diddy.

During their travels in the American West, each label used rival gangs from Los Angeles for protection: Death Row Records used Mob Piru, while Bad Boy Records used the South Side Compton Crips.

The beating of Duane Davis' nephew in Las Vegas was itself motivated by a clash that occurred between the Crips and Mob Piru a few weeks earlier, according to prosecutors.

But this story of revenge took nearly three decades to prove.

Investigators have consistently failed to locate the white Cadillac from which the fatal shots to Tupac Shakur were fired.

They also never found the murder weapon and the vehicle's passengers gradually died one after another, victims of gang violence.

At 63 years old, Duane Davis is the last surviving member of the vehicle's crew.

As early as 2008, he admitted to investigators that he was in the Cadillac. However, his confessions came within the framework of an agreement providing partial immunity, and could not be used against him.

Revelation in the memoirs

But as the years went by, the former gang member began to open up in the media, before publishing damning memoirs in 2019.

In this book, he admits that he was in the passenger seat of the vehicle, that the crew was looking for Tupac to get revenge, and that he passed the gun to the occupants of the back seat, without revealing the identity of the shooter.

It was this publication that revived the investigation and led to his arrest in 2023, before becoming the central piece of evidence in the trial.

Duane Davis "is a five-time convicted felon. He is the head of a violent street gang in Compton and, by his own admission, (...) he is the one who gave the order" to kill Tupac, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo reminded everyone on Tuesday.

During the trial, Duane Davis attempted to retract his statements. His lawyer asserted that his memoirs had been fictionalized by his co-author, and that he was in Los Angeles on the night of the murder.

A defense that was clearly ineffective with the jurors, who needed only three hours to agree on his guilt.

"You deserve every minute, every minute of the maximum sentence," Tupac's sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, told him in court on Tuesday. "It's time to reflect on what you've done to this world."