For prosecutors and Shakur’s family, the verdict marks long-delayed accountability; for Davis’s defence, it rests on unverified stories he told for attention and profit. The result has also renewed attention on the still-open killing of Notorious B.I.G.

Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas, Duane “Keffe D” Davis has become the first person convicted over the rapper’s death. The verdict resolves one prosecution, but not the wider questions surrounding the era’s other defining unsolved murder.

A Las Vegas jury found the 63-year-old guilty of murder with a deadly weapon, accepting prosecutors’ case that Davis helped plan a retaliatory attack after his nephew, Orlando Anderson, was involved in a fight with Shakur’s entourage. Prosecutors did not allege Davis fired the shots; they argued he supplied the weapon and helped set the attack in motion.¹

The state’s case relied heavily on Davis’s own accounts in a 2008 police interview, later media appearances and his memoir. Prosecutor Binu Palal said Davis’s versions changed in places but retained their central point: “The core facts remain. The material facts remain.”²

Davis’s lawyer, Michael Sanft, offered the sharply opposing interpretation. He said there was no surveillance footage, phone data or physical evidence independently placing Davis in Las Vegas or in the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired, and called the memoir “fiction and not fact.”² Davis has said he will appeal; sentencing was scheduled for 13 October.³

The conviction has prompted fresh scrutiny of the 1997 drive-by killing of Christopher Wallace, known as Notorious B.I.G. Like Shakur’s death, it has produced years of theories but no charges. Former prosecutor Neama Rahmani said the Tupac case could encourage Los Angeles authorities to revisit it, while the LAPD said Wallace’s murder “remains an open, unsolved case” within its Robbery-Homicide Division.⁴