Las Vegas jury convicts Duane Davis in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur

A Clark County jury on 31 August found Duane "Keffe D" Davis guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon in the drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas on 7 September 1996. The panel deliberated for less than three hours after an 11-day trial. Davis is 63. He is the first person convicted in a case that sat uncharged for 27 years. Judge Carli Kierny set sentencing for 13 October. The maximum is life without parole. Davis told the court he will appeal.

Prosecutors did not say Davis pulled the trigger. Chief deputy district attorney Binu Palal told jurors that Davis, then a leader of the South Side Compton Crips, put a gun in the Cadillac and ordered the shot. The target, in the state's account, was Shakur and Death Row Records co-founder Marion "Suge" Knight. Hours earlier, members of Shakur's group had beaten Davis's nephew, Orlando Anderson, at a Las Vegas casino. Palal's sentence to the jury was that in the culture Davis lived in, that beating could not stand.

Anderson has long been named as the gunman. He died in a separate shooting in 1998 and had denied the killing. The other men who were in the Cadillac that night are dead. Davis is the last of them. In a 2008 police interview played at trial, he said he was in the car and that he did not fire the rounds that hit Shakur. Shakur was shot on 7 September and died six days later.

Sekyiwa "Set" Shakur, the rapper's sister, was in the courtroom. She cried and hugged the prosecutors when the clerk read the verdict. Davis's son covered his face. Davis himself stood still, then raised a fist as deputies walked him out. He asked the judge for his phone and other personal items. Prosecutors dropped a gang-enhancement count before the verdict, citing witness logistics.

The family issued a statement through their lawyer calling the result a relief after three decades. The youngest juror was 21, born years after the shooting. That detail is the measure of how long the file sat. Davis was arrested only in 2023. The state's case leaned on the old interview, on the casino fight, and on the claim that Davis was the shot-caller in the car. The defence treated the 2008 tape as a man talking his way through a police room, not as a confession to a murder order.

Nothing about the verdict rewrites the music. It attaches a name and a count to a killing that had become a catalogue of theories, including claims Davis himself once made about Sean Combs, claims he later said were false. Combs was not on trial. Anderson cannot be tried. Knight was in the BMW with Shakur and was not the accused. The legal file now has one living defendant, one unanimous verdict, and a date in October when a judge will say how much of the rest of Davis's life is spent in a Nevada prison.

Appeals in a case this old will spend years on the tape, on the dead witnesses, and on the gap between 1996 and the charging decision. That is the next chapter. The chapter that closed on Monday is simpler. A jury in Las Vegas, in under three hours, said Davis ordered the shot that killed Tupac Shakur.