Nearly 30 years to the day since the fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, and Duane “Keffe D” Davis is standing trial for one of America’s most notorious unsolved murders.
At the core of the case is a self-published memoir by Davis, in which he claimed to be “one of the only living eyewitnesses” to the rapper’s killing.
It means, rather unusually, “he’s the defendant but he’s also the all-star witness,” said CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson.
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What is in the book?
“Compton Street Legend”, published in 2019, opens in Las Vegas on the night of 7 September 1996, with a step-by-step account of the plan to confront Shakur and Death Row Records CEO Marion “Suge” Knight in retaliation for an earlier fight.
Davis writes how he secured a gun, jumped into a Cadillac with three others and drove around before spotting the pair at a junction.
“No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the shit was about to go down!” he wrote. Shakur was hit multiple times in the shooting that followed, and died from his wounds six days later.
At first, the book “drew little attention outside of online circles devoted to hip-hop lore and true crime”, said Julia Jacobs in The New York Times. But a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department quietly began to build a case around it, and in 2023 excerpts from it convinced a grand jury to indict Davis on one count of murder, which Davis denies.
How will it be used at trial?
Given there is no murder weapon, getaway vehicle or surveillance video of the shooting, the prosecution’s case is “largely built on the defendant’s own words”, including his book, as well as podcast and documentary interviews and statements made to police, said CNN’s Eric Levenson.
Authorities accuse Davis of orchestrating the killing, without actually being the one who pulled the trigger, although he denies involvement. The prosecution team has painted him as a “shot caller” in the gang rivalry of the East and West coasts that climaxed in the shooting of Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. six months later. They say passages in the book are a confession made public in the mistaken belief he had immunity.
What does Davis say?
Davis, who has pleaded not guilty, claims that his prior statements about the night in question were false and merely an attempt to sell books.
“Not a confession to a priest, not a confession to a police officer, but rather to promote a book, to sell a product”, one of his lawyers said at a hearing last month.
His defence team unsuccessfully fought to block the use of the book during the trial, arguing that it was fictionalised and written with a co-author, making it impossible to know which parts Davis wrote.
It means the jury will face an “unusual dynamic”, said Levenson: “prosecutors are set to argue the accused murderer is credible and trustworthy, while defence attorneys will deride their client as a liar and fraud”.
The trial, which is taking place not far from the location of the shooting, is expected to take several weeks.
