A Nevada court will decide on Tuesday whether to release a former Los Angeles-area gang leader from jail and place him under house arrest ahead of his murder trial in the 1996 assassination of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, now 61, has sought release since his arrest last September, making him the only person ever charged with a crime in a killing that has sparked tremendous attention and discussion for the past 27 years.
Prosecutors claim the gunshot that murdered Shakur was the result of struggle between East Coast Bloods gang members and West Coast Crips groups, including Davis, for dominance in a musical genre known at the time as “gangsta rap.”
Carl Arnold, Davis’ defense attorney, declined to talk over the phone Monday before a hearing before Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny in Las Vegas. The judge has ruled that Davis, a self-described former head of a Crips gang sect in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Compton, California, can be released on $750,000 bond if he can show that the cash used to gain his release was obtained legitimately.
Representatives from Crum & Forster Insurance and North River Insurance Co., the Morristown, New Jersey-based bond backer mentioned in the court filing, have not returned phone calls from The AP.
Davis informed Kierny in court in February that backers were “hesitant to come in here and help me out on bail because of the media and the circus that’s going on.”
Kierny’s decision to set a bail amount came in January after prosecutors and Davis’ defense lawyers traded accusations about whether the word “green light” recorded by authorities monitoring an October jailhouse phone conversation between Davis and his son was evidence of threats to witnesses in the case or showed danger to Davis’ family members.
Davis has pled not guilty to first-degree murder. His trial is slated for November 4. If convicted, he may face life in prison. Davis’ public attorneys, who defended him before he hired Arnold, claimed in December that he was not receiving enough medical care in jail following a brush with colon cancer, which they said was in remission.
According to police, prosecutors, and Davis’ accounts, he is the only person still alive out of four people in a white Cadillac when shots were fired in September 1996, killing Shakur and grazing rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight at an intersection near the Las Vegas Strip. Knight, 59, is serving a 28-year sentence in a California prison for using a vehicle to kill a Los Angeles-area man in 2015.
Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, who was in the back seat of the Cadillac, denied involvement in Shakur’s assassination and was killed in a Compton shooting in May 1998. The other backseat passenger, DeAndre “Big Dre” or “Freaky” Smith, died in 2004. Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown, the driver, died in a 2015 shooting in Compton.
Davis has openly stated that he orchestrated the shooting, not that he was the gunman. Las Vegas police renewed their efforts to solve the case, which resulted in a search warrant and raid on his Henderson home last July.
Prosecutors claim they have enough evidence to convict Davis of murder based on his accounts from repeated police and media interviews since 2008, as well as a 2019 biography about his life as the leader of a Compton street gang.
Davis stated in his book that he was given amnesty if he told authorities in Los Angeles what he knew about Shakur and rival rapper Christopher Wallace’s fatal killings six months later. Wallace was called The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls as per APNEWS.
Arnold claims that Davis told lies to gain money and that Nevada police and prosecutors are missing important evidence such as the gun, the Cadillac, and confirmation that Davis was in Las Vegas at the time of the incident.
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