The Tupac Shakur murder trial opened in Las Vegas on Monday with prosecutors making an unusual argument: that the case against Duane “Keffe D” Davis rests largely on what Davis has said about himself, repeatedly, over three decades.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors that few people have been willing to discuss the September 1996 killing at all. Davis, he said, is the one person who has a hard time staying quiet.

The Prosecution’s Opening

Palal did not claim Davis fired the shots. He said Davis planned the shooting in retaliation for a beating his nephew had taken — and that jurors would hear this from Davis himself.

He showed the jury video of Shakur’s entourage attacking Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson outside a boxing match at the MGM Grand, hours before the shooting on Sept. 7, 1996.

According to Palal, Davis spent the following two hours working out how to retaliate. Shakur was killed, he said, as an act of revenge.

Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty. He faces life in prison if convicted of murder with a deadly weapon carried out to promote or assist a criminal gang.

Decades of Statements

The prosecution’s case is built on a trail of Davis’s own words.

In 2008, speaking to a federal task force investigating the killing of Shakur’s rival, the Notorious B.I.G., Davis turned instead to the Shakur shooting. He described handing a gun to men in the back seat of a white Cadillac, who then fired on a black BMW carrying Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight.

Palal said Davis had also spoken to the FBI in 1998 and 1999, acknowledging he was in Las Vegas when the shooting occurred, and admitted his role to Las Vegas police in 2009.

He also introduced Davis’s 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” which the defence fought to exclude along with several of the recorded interviews.

Palal characterised the motivation behind all this talking as a visceral hatred for Shakur that Davis carried for decades. Thirty years later, he told jurors, it was time to hold Davis accountable.

Members of Shakur’s family, including stepbrother Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur, listened from the gallery as audio of Davis describing the shooting played in court.

The Defence: “It’s Fiction”

Attorney Michael Sanft rejected the entire framework. What the state presents as fact, he told jurors, is really fiction, and there are no facts behind it.

His explanation for why Davis was never charged before is blunt: law enforcement knew he was full of crap.

Sanft attacked the original investigation directly, pointing to missing documents and mistrust between police departments. He described one detective’s work as biased, sloppy and incomplete.

Speaking outside court, he said the passage of time works in his client’s favour. Thirty years is an enormous problem for anyone trying to recall events accurately, he said — memory simply does not work that way.

Asked about the oddity of describing his own client in such unflattering terms, Sanft offered a shrug of an answer: everyone has a family member like that.

Davis sat in a blue suit through the proceedings, hands folded, occasionally nodding along and scanning the gallery to see who had come.

A Detour Into Another Case

Former Los Angeles police detective Fred Miller, who worked the 1997 killing of Christopher Wallace — the Notorious B.I.G. — testified remotely that Davis had briefly been a suspect in that shooting.

Davis acknowledged attending the party at the Petersen Automotive Museum where Wallace and Sean “Diddy” Combs were present. Wallace was shot as he left.

Sanft objected to the testimony. With the prosecution’s agreement, the judge instructed jurors that police do not believe Davis was involved.

The Problem of Missing Witnesses

Nobody was charged in Shakur’s killing until Davis was indicted in 2023, a gap that has fed decades of speculation in the hip-hop world.

The other three men said to have been in the Cadillac are all dead.

Retired Las Vegas officer Garry Dale, the first of an expected 35 to 45 prosecution witnesses, testified that he and a colleague stopped Knight and Shakur’s car for a missing licence plate, issued a warning and released them. About ten minutes later they responded to a shooting call and found paramedics pulling Shakur from the vehicle.

Knight had been grazed but told officers to attend to Shakur. Dale rode in the ambulance and asked Shakur who shot him. The response, as he recalled it, was something close to: no, we’ll take care of it.

Former homicide detective Brent Becker testified that Knight arrived for his police interview accompanied by attorneys — unusual for a victim. Becker described him as timid, his account rehearsed, claiming to know nothing. He said he believed Knight lied.

Getting anyone to talk proved difficult. Investigators focused on Davis, Anderson, Deandrae “Freaky” Smith and Terry “Bubble Up” Brown as the men in the Cadillac, but had no living witness who could identify them.

A Bystander’s Account

Ingrid Stokes told the court she and her friends were leaving Las Vegas when they crossed paths with Shakur and Knight, who knew a woman in her group. Knight invited them to a nightclub and they agreed to meet there.

Her car was one lane over and slightly ahead of Knight’s when the shots came. They fled in fear, nearly colliding with a white four-door vehicle.

When they came back to the scene, police made them sit on the sidewalk and treated them as suspects. Stokes said she was frightened of being seen discussing the case publicly, worried about both police treatment and possible retaliation.

The trial is expected to run about a month.