The murder case against Duane Keith Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the shooting of the rapper Tupac Shakur, will be in the hands of the jury in Las Vegas next week.
The prosecutors say that on Sept. 7, 1996, Mr. Davis was one of four people in a white Cadillac that pulled up at a red light alongside a BMW carrying Mr. Shakur and his record label boss Marion Knight, known as Suge.
Mr. Davis is charged with acquiring the gun that was used to shoot Mr. Shakur. While he is not accused of pulling the trigger, prosecutors claim he was instrumental in the murder. His 2019 self-published memoir about his time as a gang member in Compton, Calif., which said he was in the Cadillac, helped propel the case to trial.
Mr. Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder with the use of a deadly weapon. Closing arguments are scheduled for Monday. Both sides finished presenting their cases to a jury this week, wrapping up earlier than anticipated after certain witnesses, including Mr. Knight, were not called to testify by either side.
Here are five takeaways from the second week of the trial.
The jurors heard Mr. Davis’s voice over and over.
In opening statements last week, Binu Palal, a prosecutor, told jurors that on the night of a Mike Tyson prizefight, a feud between record companies on the East and West coasts and their affiliated Compton-based gangs had come to a head. Mr. Shakur’s shooting, Mr. Palal said, was a vengeful act. He added, “Remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.” Jurors have heard recordings of Mr. Davis recounting his role that night to the authorities, documentary filmmakers and YouTube interviewers.
In a 2008 interview and under a proffer agreement, Mr. Davis first gave the authorities an account that most closely resembles what he is being prosecuted for. He recalled being provided a gun by an associate of Sean Combs, the owner of the rival record company that had been at war with Mr. Knight’s label, Death Row Records. (Mr. Combs has long denied any connection to Mr. Shakur’s death.) Mr. Davis decided to pursue Mr. Knight and Mr. Shakur after an attack on his nephew, Orlando Anderson, he said. After failing to find them at a club, Mr. Davis, his nephew and two other men were heading to a hotel when they spotted the BMW, he said, and Mr. Davis passed the gun to the back of the car; Mr. Anderson shot at the vehicle after another man refused.
Jurors heard Mr. Davis repeat parts of this account in a 2009 interview with law enforcement officials, and again years later as he spoke to the showrunner of a documentary related to the shooting. The details varied; sometimes, he denied knowing who fired the gun. In audio clips played at trial, Mr. Davis’s lawyer at the time, Wayne Higgins, can be heard acknowledging that Mr. Davis is prone to boasting, something his current lawyer, Michael Sanft, has echoed in his efforts to paint Mr. Davis’s statements as self-aggrandizing exaggerations in the name of making money.
The defense said there was a lack of physical evidence.
Mr. Davis’s voice formed the crux of the prosecution’s evidence, but Mr. Sanft homed in on the lack of physical evidence tying his client to the crime or to Las Vegas the night of the shooting.
Dan Long, a former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department detective who testified as a defense witness, described his fruitless efforts to locate the murder weapon and the Cadillac that Mr. Davis and his associates purportedly rode in. Another former member of the department recalled running bullet casings recovered at the scene of the shooting through a system known as the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, first in 2003 and again in 2023, to see if they matched a weapon on file. Again, one failed to materialize.
Robert Ladd, a retired Compton Police Department detective who once worked in its gang unit, testified this week that residences in Compton affiliated with Mr. Davis were searched in the late 1990s amid escalating tensions between the South Side Compton Crips and the rival Mob Piru Bloods gang, associated with Death Row Records. A hotel receipt, a bill from the Monte Carlo casino and a letter from the Excalibur Hotel addressed to Mr. Anderson were recovered that potentially tied Mr. Davis to Las Vegas, but Mr. Ladd did not know where those items were now.
Former officer describes Mr. Davis as a ‘shot caller.’
Mr. Ladd offered jurors a crash course on the mechanics of the 55 or so gangs in Compton at the time, which largely fell into one of two camps: the Crips and the Bloods.
Mr. Davis, a Crip, was at the top of the food chain. “He was a shot caller,” Mr. Ladd testified. “He could tell the younger gangsters what to do.”
Mr. Ladd was one of dozens of officers who encountered the aftermath of Mr. Shakur’s death and the gang war that ensued in Compton. He recalled a spate of what he called retaliatory shootings, and said he assumed that the Crips had been responsible for Mr. Shakur’s death.
On cross-examination, Mr. Sanft emphasized that none of the four people said to have been in the Cadillac were killed during the ensuing violence, and that Mr. Ladd had no proof that Mr. Davis had ordered any of the shootings.
But Mr. Ladd testified that if, as the prosecutors say, Mr. Davis and his three associates were in the Cadillac that night, Mr. Davis would have been the one to give the order to shoot. “If he tells them not to do it, say, ‘Let’s handle it back in Compton,’ they wouldn’t had a shooting,” Mr. Ladd said.
A Las Vegas detective was ready to arrest Mr. Davis in 2009.
In 2009, a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who had been present for an interview of Mr. Davis in California was prepared to arrest him afterward, that detective testified.
After hearing Mr. Davis admit to acquiring the murder weapon and sitting in the same car as the shooter, the detective said that he felt there was probable cause for an arrest.
The detective’s intent, he said, was to “have Mr. Davis arrested for murder.” .
But the Clark County District Attorney’s office paused after hearing audio captured during that interview of a conversation between Mr. Davis, Mr. Davis’s lawyer Mr. Higgins and a member of law enforcement, after Mr. Long was asked to leave the room. In the recording, Mr. Davis can be heard asking Mr. Higgins and Daryn Dupree, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective investigating a 1997 murder of another rapper, whether he should tell Mr. Long that he had the gun. “Stay consistent,” Mr. Dupree responds. “’Cause the story’s already been told.”
Mr. Long eventually caught wind of a proffer agreement, which would have protected Mr. Davis from being prosecuted based on that conversation. Mr. Long made attempts to contact Mr. Higgins and the U.S. attorney’s office in California, where the interview occurred. Nobody replied, he said.
A scaled back witness list.
A handful of missing voices, some of whom the defense has claimed offer critical answers to unanswered questions, have loomed over these proceedings.
Those figures include Greg Kading, a former Los Angeles detective who interviewed Mr. Davis in 2008 and later wrote a book about the saga, and Clifford Mogg, a retired homicide detective who helped shepherd the case to trial.
Another potential witness, Corey Edwards, who prosecutors claim was with Mr. Davis in Las Vegas the day of the shooting, was not at his residence when the authorities attempted to arrest him last week, nor was he at another location in Compton when authorities tried again on Monday.
The post Tupac Shakur Murder Trial: Takeaways From Week 2 appeared first on New York Times.
