Jurors in the Tupac case return Monday to hear closings after nine days of evidence

Closing arguments in the only murder prosecution ever brought for Tupac Shakur's death are listed for Monday in Clark County District Court. Judge Carli Kierny ended the evidence on Thursday after nine sitting days. Duane Davis, known as Keffe D, did not take the stand. He is 63. He has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors Marc DiGiacomo and Binu Palal rested on Wednesday after 25 witnesses. They played nearly eight hours of recordings in which Davis describes the night of 7 September 1996. In those tapes, made on four separate occasions, he places himself in a car beside Shakur's BMW when a white Cadillac pulled up at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip and gunfire started. The accounts differ in detail. All of them put him at the scene.

Shakur was shot several times. He died six days later, on 13 September 1996. Marion Suge Knight, who was driving the BMW, survived. Knight is serving 28 years for an unrelated manslaughter conviction. He was named as a possible witness before the trial. He did not appear in the state's case.

What the state put in front of the jury

Palal told jurors in opening statements that Davis was the on-site commander of a revenge shooting. The state's theory is that the attack followed a beating of Davis's nephew earlier that night. Davis, the state says, organised the Cadillac and the gunmen. He is not charged as the person who pulled the trigger. He is charged as the man who ran the job.

Adam Stoehr, an electronic-evidence specialist in the district attorney's office, walked the jury through how the clips were compiled. A 2023 search of Davis's home produced a pile of newspaper cuttings about Shakur. Jailhouse phone calls and old media interviews filled the rest of the audio. The state treated Davis's own voice as its strongest exhibit.

The defence began on Thursday and called three former Las Vegas police officers. Counsel Michael Sanft had said he expected four witnesses and a close by Monday. The actual defence case was shorter. The officers were used to attack the quality of the original investigation: a killing that sat uncharged for 27 years, a file built late, and a defendant whose recorded stories the defence will ask the jury to treat as boasts, contradictions or both.

Why this trial exists now

No one was charged in 1996. Davis was arrested after a 2023 indictment that relied on his recorded statements and on people who had been around the Compton and Las Vegas circles of that decade. He is the first defendant. If the jury convicts, the case still leaves other names in the old street accounts untouched. If the jury acquits, the state will have spent its best evidence, which is Davis talking, and will have no second theory ready.

Fans marked the approaching anniversary at vigils this week. The legal question in front of the panel is narrower than the culture around the songs. Did this man direct the shooting? The tapes say he was there and that he had a role. The defence says the tapes are not a confession that meets the charge. Monday's speeches will put those two readings next to each other. Deliberations follow.

Thirty years after the red light on the Strip, a Las Vegas jury is the first public body asked to decide the case in a courtroom rather than in a documentary.