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Las Vegas jury finds Duane Keith Davis guilty of 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur

Confirmed1 source · Sep 1, 2026

A jury convicted the former Compton gang leader after approximately three hours of deliberation, ending a nearly 30-year-old case that hinged on Davis's own confessions.

Las Vegas jury finds Duane Keith Davis guilty of 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur
Image via The Guardian

What happened

A Las Vegas jury found Duane Keith Davis, 63, a former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, guilty of the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur. Davis was accused of instigating the shooting but not pulling the trigger himself. The jury reached its verdict in about three hours, relying heavily on multiple confessions Davis made to investigators and interviewers over the years before his arrest in 2023.

Context

Tupac Shakur, born in 1971 in East Harlem, rose to fame in the early 1990s as a rapper whose lyrics addressed social injustice, systemic racism, and police brutality. He was 25 when killed and is regarded among the greatest rappers to have lived. The verdict allows Shakur's family to move forward; his cousin told reporters: 'We've been waiting 30 years to grieve properly. A lot of people don't get to grieve until they understand what happened to their loved one and how it happened.' The case had faced criticism for decades, with Las Vegas police accused of bungling the investigation and failing to pursue crucial leads, including a witness from Shakur's entourage who claimed he could identify the shooters but died weeks later in a separate shooting.