Tupac Shakur suspect Duane Davis’ arraignment derailed again

Twenty-seven years after Tupac Shakur was gunned down in a drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas strip, an alleged gang leader was arrested on 29 September and charged with the hip-hop legend’s murder.

According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Duane “Keefe D” Davis was the leader of a plot by the Southside Compton Crips gang to kill Tupac, after the rapper and his entourage fought a member of the gang following a Mike Tyson fight on 7 September 1996.

Bevan Hurley reports:

Duane “Keefe D” Davis is expected to be arraigned today at 9am PT / 12pm ET in Clark County, Nevada.

This is the second time Mr Davis will face a potential arraignment. The first time his arraignment was postponed because he appeared without a lawyer.

Now Mr Davis will be represented by well-known attorney Ross Goodman.

Attorney Ross Goodman told The Associated Press Wednesday he’ll appear in Duane “Keffe D” Davis‘ defense against accusations that Davis orchestrated the drive-by killing of the rap music icon. Davis won’t immediately enter a plea, Goodman said, he’ll seek another two weeks to confirm that he’ll be hired for Davis’ case.

Goodman is a son of former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and current Mayor Carolyn Goodman. As a lawyer for more than two decades, he has handled a range of high-profile cases including a plea deal in August with which former Las Vegas Raiders cornerback Damon Arnette resolved a felony gun charge by pleading guilty to two misdemeanors.

His father, Oscar Goodman, is a lawyer who represented mob figures including the ill-fated Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro before serving three terms as mayor. He was famous for making public appearances with a martini in hand and a showgirl on each arm.

Jada Pinkett Smith has recently opened up about her relationship with the late rapper Tupac Shakur.

On Friday 13 October, a teaser clip for Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All The Smoke podcast showed Pinkett Smith discussing her memoir, Worthy, and her relationship with Shakur. The full podcast episode is set to be released today.

Pinkett Smith and Shakur first met as classmates when they were both at the Baltimore School for the Arts back in the 1980s. In 1995, Shakur served eight months in prison on sexual abuse charges but was released pending an appeal of his conviction. He was bailed out by Suge Knight, the co-founder of Death Row Records.

On the podcast, Pinkett Smith revealed that she visited the rapper while he was serving time on Rikers Island, and included moments from their visits in her memoir. She claimed that it was, ​​”one of the most painful parts” of the memoir-writing process.

“Seeing him there, the condition that he was in, and having to leave him there, he was in bad shape,” she told Barnes and Jackson, before revealing that the “All Eyez On Me” rapper proposed to her during one of her visits.

“So when he asked me to get married, I knew at that time that he needed somebody to do time with him - which I was going to do anyway. You ain’t have to marry me to do time, I’m here,” Pinkett Smith said.

Pinkett Smith said she viewed the proposal as Shakur looking for a support system, and not because he loved her or wanted to get married. “I think that for him, he just felt like: ‘OK, if I can tether myself, it’ll keep me on a trajectory,’” she said, noting that the marriage proposal wouldn’t have amounted to anything at the end of the day.

Duane “Keefe D” Davis is currently being held in Clark County Detention Center without bail.

Mr Davis, 60, was initially arrested on 29 September on murder charges related to the death of prolific 90s rapper Tupac Shakur. Since then, he has been held in jail.

Mr Davis will appear before Judge Tierra Jones at 9am PT for his arraignment.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis is a former Southside Compton Crips gang member and one of the last people ever to see rapper Tupac Shakur alive.

In his book, Mr Davis wrote that he spoke for the first time with federal and local authorities in 2010 about the killing.

In both the 2018 Netflix documentary Unsolved: The Tupac and Biggie Murders and in his book Compton Street Legend which he published in 2019, Keffe D claimed that his nephew Orlando Anderson fatally shot Tupac – and that he was in the car with him when he opened fire.

“Tupac made an erratic move and began to reach down beneath his seat,” he writes in the book.

“It was the first and only time in my life that I could relate to the police command, ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’ Instead, Pac pulled out a strap, and that’s when the fireworks started.”

Mr Davis says that he was in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac and had slipped the Glock pistol into the back seat where his nephew sat.

He wrote that he was facing life in prison on drugs charges and agreed to speak to investigators about the Tupac murder and the killing six months later of rapper Biggie Smalls, also known as the Notorious B.I.G.

He was arrested and charged with murder with the use of a deadly weapon in the 1996 killing of the renowned rapper on the Las Vegas strip on Friday 29 September, hours after a grand jury returned an indictment against him.

Mr Davis, who Rolling Stone says spent 15 years in prison for his role running a “multi-million-dollar nationwide drug empire” as part of the Southside Compton Crips, says he is not worried about charges over the Tupac Shakur killing.

“They want to put me in jail for life? That’s just something I got to do,” Mr Davis said in a March 2023 interview with DJ Vlad.

Judge Tierra Jones continued Duane “Keefe D” Davis’ arraignment for two weeks citing his need to figure out his attorney situation, according to court reporters.

This means Mr Davis will remain in jail until two weeks from now when his new arraignment date is set.

Wild stories continue to circulate about the gangsta rapper, who was gunned down in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in 1996.

Joe Sommerlad reports:

For the second time, Duane “Keefe D” Davis was unable to be arraigned because of attorney problems.

Mr Davis, who appeared in a Las Vegas courtroom on Thursday, stood before Judge Tierra Jones side-by-side with his supposed attorney Ross Goodman. However, Mr Goodman told the judge that he was unable to assert that he was representing Mr Davis and asked for a two-week delay.

The judge agreed to postpone it but requested they figure out the situation quickly given Mr Davis has been in jail awaiting the arraignment for weeks after he was initially arrested at the end of September.