LAS VEGAS– A former Los Angeles-area gang leader who was jailed in Las Vegas for the 1996 murder of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur has hired a private attorney to represent him ahead of his murder trial scheduled for this summer.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis fired court-appointed attorneys and hired veteran criminal defense attorney Carl Arnold, according to a court filing posted Thursday.
Robert Arroyo, one of Davis’ former attorneys from the Clark County Special Public Defender’s Office, said Monday that he and co-counsel Charles Cano wished Davis well and referred questions to Arnold, who did not immediately respond to messages.
Arnold has served as a representative of family members of people killed by police during public death investigations. He has also been sanctioned twice by the Nevada State Bar during twenty years of practice.
One, in 2018, involved failure to properly file documents in a defendant’s appeal to the state Supreme Court. The other, in 2021, involved failure to represent a defendant in Las Vegas court. Each time, Arnold was given a written reprimand and fined $1,500.
Davis, 60, and originally from Compton, California, is the only living person who was in the car from which shots were fired during the September 1996 shooting that killed Shakur and injured rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight. Knight is serving 28 years in a California prison for an unrelated fatal shooting in the Los Angeles area in 2015.
Davis has spent years detailing his role in Shakur’s murder, though his lawyers have argued that his stories accentuated the violence to attract viewers and make money.
Prosecutors say Davis accused himself of being a shot-caller in Shakur’s killing during reports to a joint federal and Los Angeles police task force in 2008; to Las Vegas police in 2009; in an interview for a BET documentary in 2017; in his own tell-all book in 2019; and in more recent interviews.
Davis was indicted by a grand jury in Las Vegas and arrested outside his home in suburban Henderson in September, and has pleaded not guilty. He remains jailed on $750,000 bail ahead of a Feb. 20 status check in the case.
If he posts bail, Davis will be placed under house arrest under strict electronic monitoring. It was not immediately clear whether the change in attorneys will delay his current trial date, June 3.
Davis claims he was granted immunity from prosecution in 2008 by an FBI and Los Angeles police force that investigated the Las Vegas murders of Shakur and rival rapper Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious BIG or Biggie Smalls, six months later.
Arroyo and Cano argued that police and prosecutors could have arrested Davis 15 years ago but did not, that he is in poor health after battling cancer, which is in remission, and that he would not flee to seek refuge. avoid a lawsuit.
His former attorneys also noted that prosecutors do not have the gun and car involved in the Shakur shooting, and they downplayed the credibility of former gang members as witnesses against Davis.