Prosecutors in the Tupac Shakur murder trial on Monday pressed jurors to take Duane Davis at his word, arguing that his years of public boasting about a role in the rapper’s 1996 killing should be enough to help convict him.
The closely watched case unfolded nearly three decades after Tupac, one of hip-hop’s most influential and enduring figures, was fatally shot in a drive-by attack in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996.
Davis, 63, was arrested in 2023 after authorities pointed to his own memoir, in which he claimed credit for the shooting, along with what prosecutors describe as a long trail of alleged admissions.
“For nearly 18 years, Duane Davis has told police, television, books, YouTube interviewers — anybody that will listen he has told he is responsible for the murder of Tupac Shakur,” prosecutor Binu Palal told jurors Monday inside a Las Vegas courtroom.
“Tell him you hear him, find him guilty,” Palal said.
Davis is not accused of personally firing the gunshots that killed Shakur. Investigators have long attributed the actual shooting to Davis’ nephew, Orlando Anderson, a fellow gang member who was killed in a shootout two years after the rapper’s death.
Prosecutors, however, contend Davis set the killing in motion as retaliation after Shakur helped attack Anderson in public only hours before the Las Vegas shooting.
Their case leans heavily on Davis’ own account of that night, including statements he gave police in 2008 while he was under investigation for criminal activity and seeking an immunity agreement.
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He repeated that story in various forms in public over the years, most notably in his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend,” where he wrote “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their ass” while providing other specifics of the murder.
Prosecutors also argued Davis’ guilt was also “drenched with circumstantial evidence” to back his own claims, laying out how he was known as a “shot-caller” among his local Crips gang and that the attack from Shakur — said to be close with a rival Bloods gang — on his nephew necessitated a response.
“That was the nature of the gang life in the 1990s in Compton – you had no choice, you could not go back to Compton after being beaten publicly,” Palal said.
But Davis’ defense argued everything he said about the murder was a fabrication — even calling the damning memoir outright fiction and comparing it to the movie “Titanic.”
“Has anybody seen the documentary called ‘Titanic,’ with Jack and Rose?” defense attorney Michael Sanft joked to the jury — urging them to remember the difference between fact and fiction based in historical events.
“What the state wants you to do is take this book as proof,” he said. “You are reading a book that is fiction and not fact, and the state wants you to believe that this is somehow a confession.”
The defense also claimed there wasn’t even proof Davis was in Las Vegas the night of Shakur’s killing, listing off the lack of footage or photographs, paperwork, receipts, phone records or ticket stubs prosecutors had to place the defendant in the city.
“They have nothing in this case that says that man was in Las Vegas on September 7th, 1996,” Sanft said. “There’s not one thing that says my client Duane Davis was in Las Vegas on that night of the shooting of Tupac Shakur.”
Davis faces life in prison if convicted of his charges of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang.
He would be the only person convicted in Shakur’s murder.
