The Tupac Shakur murder trial is scheduled to begin next month, with the judge reportedly ruling yesterday that an old interview that suspect Duane “Keefe D” Davis gave to the police is admissible at trial.
Nearly 30 years after the rap icon’s killing, the trial for the only person charged with the crime is slated ot being on Aug. 10, following multiple delays. During a pre-trial hearing on Tuesday (July 28), Las Vegas judge Carli Kierny made a ruling, allowing a 2008 police interview where Keefe D gave details about the murder to be used in court, The Associated Press reports. In the interview, Keefe D told police that suspected shooter Orlando Anderson “popped them,” meaning shot Tupac and Suge Knight, in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996.
Keefe D’s defense attorney argued that the interview was supposed to be confidential and Keefe D was told it could not be used against him. The prosecution successfully argued that the interview was no longer inadmissible, since Keefe D wrote the tell-all book, Compton Street Legend, and has spoken openly in multiple interviews about what happened on the night of Tupac’s murder.
The book will also be allowed in the trial, despite Keefe D’s attorney’s objections that it is a fictionalized account to make a profit. He also argued that Keefe was simply “exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, even though it is not in good taste.”
After being a cold case for over two decades, police arrested Keefe D in 2023, after be admitted in his book and multiple interviews to being present and providing the gun used in Tupac’s shooting, which was allegedly retaliation for a fight Tupac and Death Row members were involved in at the MGM Grand shortly before he and Suge were shot in a drive-by near the Las Vegas Strip. The other three men in the suspect car, including alleged shooter Orlando Anderson, have died since the shooting and were never charged.
Keefe D is facing life in prison if found guilty.
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