The lawyer who filed Duane “Keffe D” Davis’ appeal in the Tupac Shakur murder case is dead, and the Nevada Supreme Court has just accepted that appeal anyway.
Court records show the court officially took the case on November 9, roughly a week after attorney Michael Sanft first submitted it on October 30.
Sanft reportedly died at his Las Vegas home last week. Authorities haven’t released any details about his death, and police are investigating the circumstances.
That leaves Davis in a strange and shaky spot. He’s now facing the opening stretch of his appeal without the attorney who started it, and the clock is already running.
The court has laid out a tight schedule. Davis has two weeks to submit a transcript request form, three weeks to file a docketing statement, and 120 days to hand in his opening appeal brief.
Those early deadlines aren’t glamorous, but missing them could hurt his case before it really begins. The bigger question right now is who steps in to represent him and build the arguments against his conviction.
In October, the 63 year old was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison after a jury found him guilty of first degree murder.
The case centers on the September 1996 shooting in Las Vegas that killed Tupac, who died days later at 25.
Prosecutors never claimed Davis pulled the trigger. Their argument was that he supplied the gun used in the shooting and was inside the car involved, which they said made him responsible for the killing.
Davis has been a familiar name to anyone who has followed the case over the years. He is the uncle of Orlando Anderson, long viewed as a suspect in the shooting, who died in 1998 without ever being charged.
Davis also spoke openly about that night in interviews and in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend. Those accounts became a major part of the story once Las Vegas police arrested him in September 2023, nearly three decades after the shooting.
From Davis’ side, the fight was always going to continue. He told the judge he planned to appeal the verdict, and he also asked for the property seized from him to be returned.
For Tupac’s family and fans, the picture looks very different. The conviction felt like a long overdue moment of accountability in one of rap’s most painful unsolved stories, and an appeal threatens to drag an exhausting saga out even further.
There’s no telling yet if Davis’ challenge will change anything about the outcome. With a fresh deadline coming in two weeks and no confirmed lawyer at his side, the next move in this case belongs to whoever picks up Sanft’s file.
