Duane Davis, accused of murdering Tupac Shakur, files motion to dismiss

LAS VEGAS — A former gang leader is seeking to have all charges against him dropped in the 1990s murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur.

Attorney Carl Arnold filed a motion Monday in Nevada District Court to dismiss charges against Duane Davis in the 1996 Shakur shooting. The motion alleges “egregious” constitutional violations due to a 27-year delay years in prosecution. The motion also argues the lack of corroborating evidence and failure to comply with immunity agreements granted to Davis by federal and local authorities.

“The prosecution has failed to justify a decades-long delay that caused irreversible harm to my client,” Arnold said in a press release. “Furthermore, failure to comply with immunity agreements undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system and calls these prosecutions into serious question.” »

Clark County Prosecutor Steve Wolfson did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the case. He said the evidence against Davis was strong and it would be up to a jury to decide the credibility of Davis’ accounts of the shooting, including those in his 2019 memoir.

Davis is originally from Compton, California. He was arrested in this case in September 2023 near Las Vegas. He pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and asked to be released shortly after his arrest.

Davis is accused of orchestrating and enabling the shooting that killed Shakur and injured rap music mogul Marion “Suge” Knight after a fight at a Las Vegas Strip casino involving Shakur and Davis’ nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.

Authorities said the shootings resulted from a competition between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast groups of a Crips sect, including Davis, for dominance of a genre known at the time as “gangsta rap”.

In interviews and in a revealing 2019 memoir describing his life as the leader of a Crips gang sect in Compton, Davis said he obtained a .40-caliber handgun and handed it to Anderson in the back seat of a car from which he and Authorities say shots were fired at Shakur and Knight in another car at an intersection near the Las Vegas Strip. Davis did not identify Anderson as the shooter.

Shakur died a week later at a nearby hospital. He was 25 years old. Knight survived and is serving a 28-year prison sentence for the 2015 murder of a Compton man.

Anderson denied any involvement in Shakur’s death and died in 1998 at age 23 in a shooting in Compton. The two other men in the car also died.

A Las Vegas police detective told a grand jury that police did not have the gun that was used to shoot Shakur and Knight, nor had they found the vehicle from from which the shots had been fired.