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Attorneys for a Las Vegas man charged in the 1996 murder of rap legend Tupac Shakur claim in a new motion that authorities conducted an “unlawful” nighttime search of the former gang leader’s home based on false information.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis’s lawyers filed a motion Monday with the Clark County District Court in Nevada to toss out evidence collected during a search conducted by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
Davis was arrested in 2023 for Shakur’s murder and is expected to stand trial next August.
Robert Draskovich and William Brown claim in the motion that a judge relied on a “misleading portrait” of Davis that portrayed him as a gang leader, “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,” the motion said, according to KLAS-TV.
LAWYERS FOR SUSPECTED TUPAC SHAKUR KILLER CLAIM HIS WORDS WERE TWISTED, WANT HIM RELEASED FROM JAIL
Duane Davis, left, looks back during a hearing on claims of juror misconduct in his jailhouse battery case at the Regional Justice Center, July 2, in Las Vegas. (L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool, File)
“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 lawyers added.
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“The court wasn’t told any of this,” the lawyers argued in the motion. “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.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for comment.
Duane “Keefe D” Davis arrives in a Las Vegas court, Oct. 19, 2023, for his arraignment on murder charges in the death of rapper Tupac Shakur. (John Locher/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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The department declined to comment to The Associated Press on Friday, but said at the time of the warrant that a nighttime search would allow them to surround his home and more safely evacuate residents if Davis barricaded himself in the home.
Davis has pleaded not guilty to the murder and sought in November to dismiss the charges against him.
Tupac Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. (Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)
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“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 said in a petition to the Nevada Supreme Court that was denied.
Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting in September 1996 in Las Vegas that remained unsolved for decades until Davis’ 2023 arrest.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.