A day after a Las Vegas jury found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of first-degree murder in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur, his attorney said the defense is looking toward its next fight, an appeal.Davis, 63, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon in the fatal drive-by shooting of Shakur nearly 30 years ago.His sentencing is Oct.
13, when he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.“We were preparing for the appeal, so even Mr.Davis knew that going in,” defense attorney Michael Sanft told NBC News on Tuesday.
“Even before the first set of jurors came in for jury selection, we knew it was going to be an appeal issue.”At the center of the appeal, Sanft said, will be the judge’s decision to allow jurors to hear statements Davis made to investigators under a 2008 proffer agreement.The agreement allowed him to speak candidly about what he did or witnessed that night in 1996 without facing charges.
The defense unsuccessfully sought to exclude the proffer statements before trial, because, Sanft said, “we believed it was highly prejudicial.” Davis entered into the proffer agreement with federal investigators in 2008 as authorities investigated the killing of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as the Notorious B.I.G.During those conversations, Davis provided investigators with information about Shakur’s killing.Prosecutors in the case of Shakur’s killing, however, ultimately used Davis’ own words as a central part of their case against him, playing recordings of his statements to investigators and pointing jurors to accounts he later gave in interviews and his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”Sanft argued at trial that Davis had fabricated or embellished his accounts for money and notoriety and that investigators lacked physical evidence independently placing him at the scene of Shakur’s shooting.Davis did not testify in his own defense, but jurors heard extensively from him thr...