Duane “Keffe D” Davis went on trial in Las Vegas on August 17, 2026, for the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur. He has pleaded not guilty. He is 63. Prosecutors say he did not fire the shot. They say he planned the retaliation, got the gun, and sat in a white Cadillac that pulled up on the BMW after the Tyson fight. Twelve jurors and four alternates. Family members of Shakur in the room. A month on the calendar if the estimate holds. Thirty years after the Strip. That is day one. It is not a documentary. It is a state case.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal opened on revenge. Compton sets, Crips and Bloods, a beating that could not go unanswered in the world he described to the jury. Hotel video from the MGM Grand: Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight on Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’s nephew, hours before the shooting. Palal said Davis heard about the stomping and that in that world a response was required. Then Palal played Davis — a 2008 LAPD interview given under a promise of immunity, later public talk, a 2019 memoir. In the recording, as Court TV and Rolling Stone carried it, Davis describes a U-turn, a Cadillac, a BMW, a seat that did not give him a clear shot, and a line about what he would have done if it had. Palal’s point was that the state would not need to invent a narrator. The defendant had already talked.

Michael Sanft, for the defense, opened on the opposite inference. If that 2008 session was a confession that held, why no charge then? Because they knew he was full of it, Sanft told the panel, or they would have filed. Fact from fiction. That is the defense theme on day one: a man who sold a story, a state that waited until 2023 to arrest him, a jury that should not confuse a book and a tape with proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

What the first witnesses are for

Openings are not evidence. The first witnesses start the chain from the MGM floor to the intersection. Expect police, hotel security, timeline. Do not expect Suge Knight as a gift. He has already said he will not volunteer as a state’s witness from a California prison. Forcing him is a different fight. Anderson is dead. Other names from the Cadillac have been dead or unavailable for years. That is why a 2008 tape and a memoir are doing so much work in an opening.

How to sit with this trial

Tupac Shakur was 25. He died of the wounds from that night. A murder trial is not a concert and it is not a conspiracy forum. Davis is presumed innocent until a verdict. The prosecution’s theory is gang revenge organized by the uncle of the man beaten on a casino camera. The defense’s theory is a loud inmate who became useful too late. Jurors were asked if they knew the music and how they felt about gangs. That voir dire is the country this case has to live in.

Life in prison is the exposure if the state wins. He has been in Clark County Detention since the 2023 arrest. Family in the gallery does not get a closing from the press. They get a month of people arguing about a car that passed in 1996.

Day one was an opening, a video of a beating, a tape of a man talking, and a lawyer asking why the tape did not become an indictment for fifteen years. The rest of the month is whether that talk is a confession or a performance. Las Vegas will decide. The records already decided that Shakur is gone. Keep those two facts in different tenses. One is alleged. One is not.