Verdict delivered 30 years after the murder of Tupac Shakur
Former gang leader Duane "Keffe D" Davis was sentenced to life in prison. The famous rapper was shot dead in 1996 and remained one of the most high-profile unsolved cases in the US for the next several decades. Then Duane Davis "gave himself away" through his interviews and memoirs.
Sentence served 30 years after Tupac Shakur's murder
A Las Vegas court sentenced 63-year-old Duane Davis, known in the underworld as "Keeffe D", to life imprisonment in connection with the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur.
In late August, the court found him guilty in this case.
According to the sentence, Davis will not have the right to request parole for up to 40 years.
"For three years, I've listened to you give me various versions of the same thing: 'Yeah, I was involved in that. But now I'm a different guy. I'm past that. I moved out of Compton. I'm a grandpa now,'" Judge Carli Kierny said while reading the sentence.
"You had no right to take someone away from their family. You don't have the right to deprive him of his life, his entire future, and then just walk away as if nothing happened," she said, addressing the defendant.
Tupac Shakur was one of the most famous rappers of the 1990s. He fell victim to murder on September 7, 1996, at the age of 25. At that time, as he was heading to a nightclub in a car with music mogul Marion "Suge" Knight, he was shot at from a passing Cadillac alongside them. He died in the hospital on September 13, while "Suge" survived.
For many years, this murder remained one of the most high-profile unsolved cases in the US. Law enforcement agencies suspected from the beginning that the murder was the result of a criminal feud between rival gangs, but for decades, insufficient evidence was found to charge anyone.
Duane Davis was a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips—a Compton (a suburb of Los Angeles) branch of the Crips gang. Meanwhile, "Suge" Knight, who produced Tupac, was affiliated with the Mob Piru Bloods group, considered a rival to that criminal gang.
Davis was the uncle of Orlando Anderson, who was questioned in Tupac's murder case back in 1996: police suspected Anderson of the murder because a conflict had arisen between him and Tupac in one of the clubs a few hours before the incident, and the rapper's bodyguard had beaten him. Anderson was not officially charged, and he died in a shooting in 1998.