Duane “Keffe D” Davis has been sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur, more than 30 years after the rapper was fatally shot in Las Vegas.
The sentence was handed down on Tuesday, 13 October, according to The Associated Press and CNN’s sentencing report. Davis, 63, was convicted of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon.
A Clark County jury returned the guilty verdict on 31 August after an 11-day trial and almost three hours of deliberations, Reuters reported.
The case against Davis
Prosecutors argued that Davis helped organise the attack and supplied the gun used in the shooting. They did not have to prove that he fired the fatal shots: the case concerned his role in arranging and assisting the killing.
The prosecution relied heavily on Davis’s accounts of the shooting in recorded interviews and his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend. In those accounts, he described travelling in a white Cadillac and passing a gun to men in the back seat before shots were fired at Shakur’s vehicle.
His defence lawyer, Michael Sanft, disputed the reliability of those accounts during the trial, arguing that the memoir was fiction and that the prosecution lacked corroborating evidence. The jury rejected the defence and convicted Davis.
A killing that remained unsolved for decades
Shakur was shot on 7 September 1996 while riding with Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight. The attack followed a confrontation involving Shakur’s entourage and Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, earlier that night.
The rapper died six days later, on 13 September, aged 25. Police arrested Davis on 29 September 2023, 27 years after the shooting.
Davis is the only person to have been criminally charged over Shakur’s death. Tuesday’s sentencing follows the first murder conviction in the case.
Sources used for this report5 verified links
- Associated Press: Davis sentenced to 40 years to life, 13 October 2026
- CNN sentencing report, via ABC17, 13 October 2026
- Reuters: jury verdict and trial evidence, 31 August 2026
- UPI: 2023 arrest, shooting chronology and LVMPD handout photograph
- Alexis Doine: Tupac’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, CC0 image
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