The lawyer who stood beside the only man ever charged with killing Tupac Shakur took the job without getting paid a cent.
Michael Sanft, who defended Duane “Keffe D” Davis during his murder trial in August, has died at 55, according to the coroner’s office in Clark County, Nevada.
The coroner’s office says the cause of death is still pending, and no official date of death has been given. CNN affiliate KVVU, citing sources, reported that Sanft was found dead in his home Friday morning.
For a stretch this summer, Sanft was hard to miss. As the trial played out, his face was all over TV screens and social media feeds across the country, which comes with the territory when your client is the one person ever charged in the murder of a rapper who was 25 and at the peak of his career.
He worked the case for free. The drug money that once funded Davis’ lifestyle had long since dried up, and Sanft never pretended otherwise.
“The idea of money with the Davis family has never been an issue for me, nor has this money come from any other source,” he told podcaster Lena Nozizwe in July. “Because there isn’t any.”
The verdict didn’t go his way. Davis was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for orchestrating the decades old killing of the rap mogul on the Las Vegas Strip.
Some of the warmest words so far have come from across the aisle. Binu Palal, one of the prosecutors who worked to convict Davis, said Monday he was saddened to lose someone he’d called a friend for many years.
Mike was an exceptionally talented trial attorney and a fierce advocate for his clients,” Palal said in a statement to CNN. “We stood on opposite sides of a highly publicized case, but our professional differences never diminished our friendship or the respect we had for one another.”
Outside the Shakur case, Sanft was the lead trial attorney for SOS Injury Lawyers and had practiced for decades, taking more than 150 cases to jury verdict.
His firm described him as “one of the most respected and effective trial attorneys in America,” adding that he had partnered with lawyers who once defended the very companies he went on to sue.
His road to that courtroom started a long way from Las Vegas. According to his firm biography, Sanft grew up in Tonga in a home with no electricity, sharing a single water faucet with three other houses, before moving to San Diego at 12.
After serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he enrolled at Brigham Young University’s Hawaii campus.
There he found what his biography calls “a bridge to his native culture,” dancing at the Polynesian Cultural Center.
That faith followed him into the Davis case. “In this case, when you have a person’s life on the line, there’s always a prayer in your heart that you will be guided in the way that you should,” he told Nozizwe.
For now, the coroner’s office has yet to say what killed him. And Davis, now serving his sentence, has lost the man who fought for him when no one was paying.
