Pria Rai
BBC Newsbeat presenter

The ex-gang leader was known to law enforcement before his arrest in 2023.

He'd made a deal with them. In exchange for information about Tupac’s case, he wouldn’t be charged. It stood for years.

But then came his book in 2019.

Compton Street Legend is a memoir co-written by Duane "Keffe D" Davis, which claims he’d “tossed" the gun used to kill Tupac into the backseat of the car from which the shots came.

Prosecutors argued it broke the deal because Davis had gone public with his knowledge. Davis's defence have argued sections were fictionalised to make a profit.

The judge allow the book to be used in the case against Davis. It’s not claimed in the book or otherwise that Davis actually fired the shots that killed Tupac. Davis has pleaded not guilty.

For those of you in the UK, you can watch the video below in which we explain the charge, and the role the book played in reigniting the investigation into Tupac's murder.

Shaimaa Khalil
North America correspondent

Mopreme Shakur lights up when he talks about his younger brother. He’s animated and still laughs at memories of the good times.

“I miss our play time. Pac couldn't play many sports," he smiles.

“So, when the guys would get together and we would play basketball from time to time, it was so funny to watch Pac trying to play basketball because he could not.”

“He was fun, he was energetic, he could be aggressive sometimes, and he was sensitive.”

Tupac died at 25, at the height of his career. His records were selling millions, while films including Juice and Poetic Justice had made him known in Hollywood as well.

But Mopreme says success never erased the difficulties of Tupac’s childhood—or their lasting impact.

“I think Pac was actually traumatized by the poverty... having no lights, having no food from time to time, having no clothes while you're going to school, got to go to school every day, and bumming clothes.”

“Pac was sensitive, so he felt all those things deeply. And he was blessed with the gift of being able to express himself and make people feel it.”

Image source, Getty Images

That fatal night began when Tupac and Knight attended a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand.

After the match, surveillance footage captured Tupac and members of his entourage, who police have said were associated the Mob Piru Bloods street gang, attacking a man named Orlando Anderson, an alleged member of the South Side Compton Crips.

About three hours after the attack, Tupac was riding in the passenger seat of Knight's BMW driving through Las Vegas when a white Cadillac pulled alongside them and opened fire.

Tupac was hit four times and died six days later.

For nearly three decades, the killing remained one of America's most famous unsolved murders. There is no single explanation why.Las Vegas police have long said witnesses refused to co-operate.

Members of Tupac's entourage said police initially treated them like suspects and failed to follow important leads. Within weeks of the shooting, investigators had identified Anderson from the MGM footage and questioned him.

He denied involvement and was never charged; he was killed in an unrelated shooting in 1998.

Over the years, police say they pursued thousands of tips, but the case stalled amid disappearing witnesses, many of whom were also killed in gang-related shootings, limited physical evidence, and a street code that forbade co-operation with police.

It was years later when Anderson's uncle, Davis, started talking and, according to police, blew the case wide open again.

Image source, Getty Images

Judge Carli Kierny became a district court judge in Clark County, Nevada in 2021 after spending 10 years with the county public defender’s team. She is originally from Duluth, Minnesota.

She began her legal career as a public defender in Illinois after earning a bachelor's degree in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law.

In June, Kierney ruled that a 2008 police interview with Duane Davis about the murder of Tupac can be used in court.

Davis’s defense attorney has argued that the interview should be be admissible in court because police told Davis at the time that the interview was confidential and couldn't be used against him. But prosecutors were successful in arguing that Davis gave up that right to confidentiality when he began publicly speaking about the details of Tupac's death.

"I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted," Davis wrote in his memoir Compton Street Legend, published in 2019.

Shaimaa Khalil
Reporting from Court in Las Vegas

Image source, Getty Images

"Fact or fiction?" That is the question Duane Davis’s lawyer, Michael Sanft, asked jurors to consider during his opening statements today, before the first witnesses were called.

Sanft has laid out his defence strategy as portraying the prosecution's case as the product of a flawed, decades-long investigation, pointing to missing police reports, disputed evidence and what he called "biased, sloppy and incomplete" detective work.

He said prosecutors would rely on "unreliable people with criminal records, financial motivations and inconsistent statements".

Sanft also attacked a former Los Angeles police detective expected to feature in the case, describing him as "disgraced" and accusing him of manipulating witnesses and shaping their accounts to fit the investigation’s theory.

The defence argues those witnesses changed their stories over time and were influenced by money, media attention or information supplied by investigators.

Sanft also singled out former Death Row Records security chief Reggie Wright Jr, arguing that he was not present when the shooting happened despite being responsible for protecting label boss Suge Knight.

The defence says Davis's own accounts were embellished to sell books. Davis has pleaded not guilty.

The court has now adjourned for lunch.

Defence attorney Michael Sanft now gets to cross examine Stokes.

He asks her to draw a map of her friends' route that night through the Las Vegas streets. She draws a sketch on a piece of note paper, which Sanft then enters into evidence and displays to the jury.

Stokes tells him that when their car pulled up alongside Shug and Tupac's car, Tupac was "relaxed" and "sitting in the passenger seat.

"There was no engagement," she tells the court.

Ingrid Stokes says after she and her friends drove down a nearby street, and they then came back to the intersection where the shooting occurred.

Although they were sceptical of talking to police, Stokes says, they decided to share that they were nearby the shooting, despite not having seen much of what happened.

Police had them sit on the curb and asked them some questions, and she tells the court she was concerned about being seen talking to police.

Image source, Reuters

The prosecution calls its next witness, Ingrid Stokes, who was present at the time of the shooting.

She had travelled to Las Vegas with friends that weekend in September 1996. They had planned to go to a Mike Tyson fight but missed it, she says.

She and her friends got in their car and started to drive around Las Vegas, before they ran into Marion 'Suge' Knight and Tupac "in the car".

Her friend knew Marion 'Suge' Knight, and Suge suggested the women follow them to a club, Stokes says.

They started to drive through Vegas, but “there was a car behind us, trying to get in front of us,” Stokes says.

At one point, they stopped at a light and pulled over, to switch drivers due to concerns about the other vehicle.

“We were head down, taking our seat belts off, when we heard the gunshots. All hell broke loose,” Stokes says.

Defence attorney Michael Sanft has also questioned Garry Dale.

Sanft asks Dale to describe the Las Vegas strip on the night of the shooting. Dale says it was an "average" night in terms of traffic, "nothing out of the ordinary".

Sanft then asks the former police officer whether "a caravan of cars" - a description used in the prosecution's opening statement earlier - was behind Tupac's car when it was pulled over. Dale says there was not.

Garry Dale then describes a scene about ten minutes later with the same vehicle.

He says Marion Knight was "outside of the vehicle, walking around, talking" and Tupac Shakur was being "removed by EMS (emergency medical services) people".

Dale says Knight was "adamant that we needed to go and take care of Mr Shakur," while the rapper was bleeding from a "chunk of shrapnel" in his head.

Dale says he rode to the hospital in the ambulance with Shakur, during which time he was still talking but when he asked Shakur who had attacked him he replied "something like 'no, we'll take care of it'".

Image source, Reuters

The prosecution calls its first witness - Garry Dale, who was working for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in September 1996.

He says he was assigned to work on the Strip at 23:00 that evening.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo asks Dale if he was involved in a "car stop" of a vehicle. Dale says he "initiated a car stop" on a black BMW "that had no licence plates".

Dale is then shown a map and is asked to point out where the car stop happened.

He says the occupants communicated their names after being asked. Dale adds he had "no knowledge" of them before that, and when asked if he recalls them, he identifies them as Tupac Shakur and Marion Knight.

Dale says he asked them why the vehicle had no licence plate and the response was because they were filming a video.

Dale then says he told them they would have to put "the plate back on their car", warned them and then released them.

Shaimaa Khalil
Reporting from court in Las Vegas

Image source, Reuters

I’ve been inside the courthouse, watching the opening statements from an overflow room.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis—the only man ever charged in connection with Tupac Shakur’s murder—sat with a neutral expression, occasionally watching the prosecutor outline events from 7 September 1996.

Jurors were shown diagrams of alleged gang links, CCTV footage of the MGM Grand fight — in which Tupac and his entourage attacked Davis’s nephew— and a sketch of the white Cadillac and its four occupants.

That diagram placed Davis in the front passenger seat, with his nephew Orlando Anderson behind him.

Prosecutors say Davis obtained a gun before the four men spotted Tupac’s car, made a U-turn and pulled alongside it. They allege Davis passed the weapon to the back seat.

“You will hear from Keffe D himself,” the prosecutor told jurors.

Much of the case rests on Davis’s own accounts in interviews and his memoir

Image source, Reuters

The prosecution and defence have finished giving their opening statements.

The court is now taking a 15-minute break. Stick with us - we'll let you know when they return.

Image source, Reuters

Sanft says state witnesses will be "unreliable people with criminal records, financial motivations and inconsistent statements".

Among them is a security officer for Death Row Records, Reggie Wright Jr, and a "disgraced" LAPD detective, Sanft says.

On Wright Jr, one of the things Sanft says is that he had ordered his team not to be armed on the night of the shooting.

"He wasn't even around when the shooting occurred," Sanft says.

"So the principal, the person he should have been protecting the most - would have been Suge Knight, the head of Death Row Records, this man [Wright Jr] was nowhere to be found."

Sanft says that in 2017 a group called the Center of Investigative Reporting filed a Freedom of Information Act request to gain access to the murder files held by the Las Vegas police department.

After the police department refused to release the files, the Senate then filed a lawsuit forcing them to release the files, Sanft says.

That's when Detective Clifford Mogg comes in, saying he's just there to close out the case, not to solve the mystery of who killed Tupac, Sanft says.

Detective Mogg in 2018 then receives a copy of the "Death Row Chronicles" in 2018, which is not a deposition and not a testimony under oath, Sanft says.

"You know what happens when he receives that copy of the interviews that the state has basically shown you in this case? No charges filed," Sanft says.

Sanft says Mogg did not properly file reports and accuses his work of being "biased, sloppy and incomplete".

Sanft says misconduct and incompetence existed in the various police departments who had a role in the murder investigation.

He alleges another investigator, Detective Long, faced significant obstacles when he took over the investigation, which Sanft says he will testify to later in the trial.

Sanft says there were issues with the testing of the alleged murder weapon, and alleges the Los Angeles Police Department gave Long a "fake" gun to test.

Leads also began to wither and people's memories grew foggy as the case dragged on, Sanft says.

Sanft points out what he says are issues with the investigative practices that oversaw the case.

Sanft tells the jury that many reports by one detective, Brent Becker, are now missing, "they’re gone".

He said it is the responsibility of police to pass these records along to new detectives.

Sanft also alleges that Becker did not trust Compton’s police department due to a lieutenant’s purported ties to gang-affiliated individuals.

Image source, Reuters

Palal has wrapped up his statement and the Davis's lawyer is now beginning his.

Defence attorney Michael Sanft is asking the jury to consider whether Palal has presented "fact or fiction" to them.

Sanft says the prosecutor has presented fictional details as fact.

Image source, Reuters

Palal says in 2019 Davis published his own book, Compton Street Legend.

The prosecutor says the book shows Davis was "mad" about the beating of his nephew Orlando Anderson, that he was in Las Vegas the night of the fight, he got the gun, he was in the white Cadillac and he handed the gun to someone.

"A constant thing that always goes through these statements is Duane Davis' visceral anger at Tupac Shakur for putting hands on his nephew," Palal says.

He also reads a quote from Davis' book: "Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their ass."