Ex-gang leader pleads not guilty over 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur

A US Judge has set the date for the trial regarding the 1996 killing of hip-hop music star Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. The murder trial of a former, Southern California, street gang leader will take place on June 3.

Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis has become the only person to be charged over the murder of the musician.

The accused was arrested on 29 September outside a Las Vegas-area home where police served a search warrant on July 17.

Davis made a brief court appearance yesterday and spoke quietly with two court-appointed lawyers who were named to his case before he pleaded not guilty last Thursday. He has remained in a Las Vegas jail since.

His public defenders, Charles Cano and Robert Arroyo, said they intend to file documents seeking his release on bail ahead of trial. The lawyers declined outside court to comment about the case, saying they have not had time to examine what prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo termed “voluminous” evidence.

Davis has said publicly in recent years during interviews and in a 2019 memoir – which describes his life leading a Crips gang in Compton – that he orchestrated the drive-by shooting that killed Shakur and wounded rap music mogul Marion ‘Suge’ Knight.

Knight is now serving 28 years in prison in California for the death of a Compton businessman in 2015.

Duane Davis is the only person still alive who was in the vehicle from which the shooting happened.

It is believed that the 1996 shooting followed conflict between East Coast and West Coast groups over dominance in the world of gangsta rap.

A grand jury was told that Tupac Shakur was involved in a fight sometime before the shooting at a Las Vegas Strip casino with Davis’s nephew, Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson.

Although he was in the car with Davis, he denied involvement in Shakur’s killing. Anderson died two years later in a shooting in Compton.

Davis believed he was promised immunity from prosecution in 2010 when he told authorities in Los Angeles what he knew about the fatal shootings of Shakur and rival rapper Christopher Wallace – known as The Notorious BIG or Biggie Smalls – six months later in Los Angeles.