JUST IN: TUPAC’S KILLER DUANE DAVIS SENTENCED TO LIFE IN PRISON AFTER 1996 MURDER

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the only person ever charged in connection with the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison on Tuesday in a Las Vegas court following his conviction in August.

Members of Shakur’s family delivered emotional victim impact statements during the sentencing hearing, describing the profound personal grief and lasting generational loss caused by the death of the hip-hop icon.

“I do believe that when you take a life like that, you deserve every minute, every minute of the maximum amount of punishment, time to sit down and contemplate what you’ve done to this world, not just to me,” Sekyiwa Shakur, the rapper’s sister, said.

In delivering the sentence, Judge Carli Kierny said Davis would not escape accountability for taking a life, despite the decades that had passed since the killing.

“At this time, you are going to face justice for what you did,” the judge said.

The sentence comes more than 30 years after Shakur was shot in a drive-by attack near the Las Vegas Strip on September 7, 1996. The rapper died from his injuries six days later.

In the years following the killing, Davis repeatedly gave accounts of the incident during police interviews, in a self-published memoir and in several televised interviews. Prosecutors said his statements revealed his central role in orchestrating the attack.

During his closing argument, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo cited Davis’s own words to highlight what he described as the defendant’s attempts to evade responsibility.

“I beat the streets, I beat the Feds, and I beat cancer,” DiGiacomo quoted Davis as saying before urging jurors to hold him accountable for the murder.

Davis, now 63, has said he intends to appeal his conviction.

A former Los Angeles gang leader who later retired to the Las Vegas suburbs, Davis was arrested in September 2023 and charged with murder involving the use of a deadly weapon in connection with Shakur’s death. He has remained in custody since his arrest.

Following his arrest, Davis pleaded not guilty and maintained his innocence.

His defence lawyers argued that he had lied about his involvement in the killing and that prosecutors had failed to provide sufficient evidence placing him in Las Vegas on the night of the shooting, particularly inside the white Cadillac from which the fatal shots were allegedly fired.

“The danger in this case has always been, just because we say something, is it true?” Davis’s lawyer, Michael Sanft, told the jury during the trial.

However, prosecutors pointed to Davis’s repeated public statements about his role in the killing, which they said stemmed from escalating tensions involving diss tracks and gang retaliation following the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon boxing match on the night of the shooting.

Prosecutors also argued that Davis had violated a previous immunity agreement with a joint Los Angeles law enforcement task force by continuing to disclose details of the killing and profiting from his accounts.

Investigators said his public statements helped revive the long-running case, with authorities working to corroborate his claims using other evidence.

In August, a jury of 12 Clark County residents unanimously found Davis guilty of first-degree murder involving the use of a deadly weapon after deliberating for less than three hours.

Although prosecutors acknowledged that Davis did not personally pull the trigger, they maintained that he orchestrated the drive-by shooting that killed the legendary rapper.