Keefe D's lawyers seek to suppress evidence in Tupac Shakur's 1996 murder case, claiming “unlawful nighttime search"

Duane "Keefe D" Davis' lawyers are reportedly seeking to suppress evidence obtained in an alleged “unlawful nighttime search" ahead of Davis' trial for his supposed involvement in the 1996 murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur. For those uninformed, Davis was arrested in 2023 for allegedly orchestrating Shakur's murder. The Hit Em Up rapper died after a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas at 25.

At the time of his arrest, the authorities claimed that Davis was the “shot caller” of the crew and “orchestrated the plan that was carried out,” further alleging that Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson was the shooter. Anderson, who is Davis' nephew, died in an unrelated gang shooting in 1998.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Keefe D's trial is scheduled for August 2026. On December 22, 2025, Davis' attorneys filed a motion at the Clark County District Court, requesting that the evidence obtained during a search by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department be dismissed.

The lawyers claimed that a judge had approved the search warrant at the time due to a "misleading portrait” of Davis as an alleged drug dealer, "when in fact his drug convictions were [25] years old, and he was now a [60]-year-old retired cancer survivor that had lived quietly in the same Henderson home for nearly a decade."

“Second, the court overlooked the case-specific urgency or safety concerns Nevada law requires to justify nighttime searches, accepting instead generic safety theories that would apply to virtually any search of any home," the motion said.

It continued:

"The court wasn’t told any of this. As a result, the court authorized a nighttime search based on a portrait of Davis that bore little resemblance to reality — a clearly erroneous factual determination, in other words."

The Las Vegas police have not commented on Davis' motion as of this article. However, at the time of the search, police said executing the warrant at night would allow them to secure the neighborhood and safely evacuate residents if Davis decided to barricade himself.

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Keefe D's trial was postponed by six months due to "voluminous" evidence

Keefe D's trial was reportedly pushed back by six months due to the "voluminous" amount of evidence, with the new trial date set for August 10, 2026. Davis, who was arrested in 2023, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and has been in jail without bail since his arrest.

He continued to maintain his innocence in recent interviews despite previously sharing knowledgeable information about Tupac Shakur's murder. In a March 2025 interview with ABC News, Keefe D emphasized his innocence and said he was supposed to be enjoying his family life, adding:

“I’m innocent. I ain’t killed nobody, never did ever kill nobody. I’m supposed to be out there enjoying my twilight at one of my f**king grandson’s football games, and basketball games. Enjoying life with my kids."

Keefe D also addressed the incriminating statements he had provided in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, claiming that he never read the book. He also alleged that the co-author, Yusuf Jah, took artistic liberties, saying, “I just gave him details of my life. And he went and did his little investigation and wrote the book on his own.”

In the memoir, Keefe D had detailed an alleged meeting with Sean "Diddy" Combs at Greenblatt’s, accusing the Bad Boy Records founder of ordering a hit on Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight. The memoir also recounted Shakur's fight with the Crip gang member Orlando Anderson (Davis' nephew) after the Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas, just hours before the drive-by shooting.

An image on a television monitor shows Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight attending a boxing event in Las Vegas the night Shakur was killed (Image via Getty)

Keefe D wrote that things became "ominously personal" after Tupac Shakur and other Death Row associates jumped his nephew. He continued to write about procuring a .40 Glock from someone called Zip and driving to Club 662, where Knight and Shakur were supposed to show up for a Death Row afterparty.

However, neither man reportedly came to the club, resulting in Davis and his men driving away. They spotted Shakur and Knight in a BMW when they stopped to buy champagne, and opened fire at the car, following which they “popped our bottles and partied like it was any other night.”

In the memoir, Keefe D wrote that he now had a "deep sense of remorse" for what happened to Shakur, calling the rap icon a "talented artist with tons of potential to impact the world." However, he also wrote that the late rapper's altercation with Anderson gave him "the ultimate green light" to retaliate, writing:

"However, I stand firm on the point that Tupac, Suge Knight, and the rest of those n***as didn’t have any business putting their hands on my beloved nephew Baby Lane. Period. Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their a**. Tupac chose the wrong game to play and the wrong n***as to play with."

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The deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. (who was also killed in a drive-by shooting six months after Shakur) and the East Coast-West Coast rivalry were re-examined in Netflix's docuseries about Diddy, titled Sean Combs: The Reckoning, which premiered on December 2, 2025.

The docuseries included clips of Keefe D's 2008 proffer interview with the police, where he claimed that Diddy had offered to pay him $1 million for a hit on Shakur.

Edited by Juhi Marzia