A jury took just three hours to find Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon in the killing of Tupac Shakur, but Davis is not acting like a man who thinks the story is over.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the 63-year-old former gang boss said flatly, “I ain’t worried. I’m getting out on an appeal. We already filed it before the trial even started.”
Davis claims his civil rights were violated and is treating the conviction as a temporary setback rather than a final verdict.
His former attorney Edi Faal apparently told him early on that he might have to serve two or three years but would ultimately come out ahead financially, and Davis is clearly holding onto that framing.
Sentencing is set for October 13, where Davis faces life in prison without parole. That is a long way from the outcome he is describing, but he has been vocal about his confidence in the appeals process.
One of the stranger details to surface from his Hollywood Reporter interview is that Davis tried to get Sean Combs and Dr. Dre to fund his legal defense.
He said he had a connection through a football coach at the school where Combs’ daughters study and tried to pass along a message, but never got through.
He also reached out to Dre, adding, “He never would’ve met Suge [Knight] if not for me,” suggesting he felt owed a favor.
Neither Combs nor Dre responded to those requests, and Davis ended up without the legal firepower he was hoping for.
The defense team he did have argued that his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” was fictional, but a judge allowed it to be introduced as evidence at trial.
That memoir is at the center of why this case even got to court after nearly three decades. In it, Davis wrote that he provided the gun used in the killing and rode in the car with his nephew Orlando Anderson, who he claims fired the fatal shots.
He described Tupac appearing to reach for a weapon before the shooting, framing it as something other than a straightforward execution, though the jury clearly did not find that framing persuasive.
Davis was arrested in 2023, making him the only person ever formally charged in connection with Shakur’s death.
Tupac was shot in Las Vegas in September 1996 at just 25 years old, and his murder had remained one of the most talked-about unsolved cases in music history for nearly 27 years before that arrest.
Shakur had sold more than 75 million records worldwide by the time of his death and was deep in a public rivalry with Biggie Smalls, who was himself shot and killed just six months later in March 1997.
Neither case had seen a conviction until now, which makes the speed of the jury’s deliberation in the Davis trial all the more striking.
Davis ended his interview by pointing to his two grandsons, both of whom he says are college football prospects with scholarship offers.
“When they get their millions, they’re coming to get me out of here,” he said. Whether that reads as defiance or delusion probably depends on where you stand on the verdict.
