Lawyers for Duane “Keffe D” Davis are asking a judge to suppress evidence gathered during a nighttime search of his home, arguing the warrant was approved based on inaccurate information about his background.
Davis is charged with first-degree murder in the 1996 drive-by shooting death of rapper Tupac Shakur on the Las Vegas Strip. His attorneys, Robert Draskovich and William Brown, filed the motion this week in Clark County court.
The filing argues that nighttime search warrants are meant for limited situations, such as when evidence may be destroyed if officers wait until daylight. The defense says police justified the request by portraying Davis as an active and dangerous drug trafficker, a description they say no longer applied.
According to the motion, Davis left the drug trade in 2008 and later worked inspecting oil refineries. His attorneys say he was living quietly in Henderson with his wife for nearly a decade before the search and was a retired cancer survivor with adult children and grandchildren.
“The court wasn’t told any of this,” the attorneys wrote. “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.”
Police seized electronic devices, what they described as marijuana, and containers of photographs during the search. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department declined to comment Friday, citing pending litigation.
Police previously said executing the warrant at night allowed officers to secure the residence and reduce risk to nearby residents. They also said darkness would help evacuate neighboring homes if Davis barricaded himself.
Davis was arrested in September 2023 and has pleaded not guilty. He has sought release since shortly after his arrest.
His attorneys argue the case relies largely on Davis’ own public claims that he was inside the white Cadillac from which Shakur was shot. They say Davis never provided specific details confirming his presence and benefited from making the statements.
The motion says Davis avoided drug charges by recounting the story under a proffer agreement and later profited by repeating it in documentaries and a 2019 book.
Davis previously asked the Nevada Supreme Court to dismiss the charges. The court denied the request in November.
“Think of it this way: Shakur’s murder was essentially the entertainment world’s JFK assassination—endlessly dissected, mythologized, monetized—so it’s not hard to see why someone in Davis’s position might falsely place himself at the center of it all for personal gain,” his attorneys wrote.
