Former American gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for orchestrating the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, BBC reports on Tuesday.
According to the BBC, a jury found Davis guilty of one count of murder with a deadly weapon in September over the drive-by shooting that killed the rapper in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996.
The 63-year-old, who has said he will appeal the verdict, was accused by prosecutors of organising the killing, although he did not fire the gun himself.
Prosecutors argued that Davis, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips street gang, supplied the firearm used in the shooting and that his nephew, Orlando Anderson, opened fire on Shakur.
Anderson, who denied involvement in the killing, died in an unrelated shooting in 1998.
The BBC reported that Davis’ own statements played a central role in the case. He had repeatedly acknowledged being inside the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired.
In a secret police interview in 2008 concerning the killing of fellow rapper Christopher Wallace, popularly known as The Notorious B.I.G., Davis disclosed information about his role in Shakur’s death under an agreement intended to protect him from prosecution.
However, his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, and subsequent media interviews in which he discussed the killing undermined that protection, allowing prosecutors to use the police interview as evidence at his trial.
During the trial, Davis’ defence team argued that his accounts were fabricated or exaggerated to sell books and attract publicity.
Shakur was 25 when he was killed and was regarded as one of hip-hop’s most influential artists. He has sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
His killing remained one of the United States’ most prominent unsolved murder cases for nearly three decades, fuelling numerous theories about the circumstances surrounding his death.
Davis’ conviction marked the first in the long-running case.
