If the court were to impose anything but the law that was in place in 1996, which mandates an equal and consecutive deadly weapon enhancement, it would be turned back by the prison.
Judge Carli Kierny, from the bench before sentencing Duane Davis, October 13, 2026
Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny sentenced Duane “Keffe D” Davis on Tuesday to 40 years to life in prison for orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur, 30 years and 36 days after the drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip. The 40 now sitting in every headline was fixed before either lawyer argued a word, by a sentencing rule that Nevada scrapped in 2007 and that still governs a crime committed in 1996.
The hearing itself explains this, in a dispute over paperwork that came before the sentence. (The hearing quotes in this piece come from the proceeding’s captions, checked across four broadcast feeds.) Davis’s lawyer, Michael Sanft, objected that the state’s pre-sentence report listed the wrong penalty for an offense that predates a change in the law. Kierny agreed. “I agree that the charge range is incorrect in the PSI,” she said, and then delivered the line above.
How a 20-Year Minimum Became 40
Nevada’s murder statute starts the parole clock for first-degree murder at 20 years whenever the sentence allows parole at all. The jury that convicted Davis on August 31 also found that he used a deadly weapon, and that finding carries a penalty of its own.
Today that penalty is far smaller. A 2008 Nevada Supreme Court opinion records that lawmakers amended the statute in 2007 to allow “a consecutive sentence with a minimum term of not less than one year and a maximum term of not more than 20 years.” Before that, the court wrote, the law “mandated that a defendant serve an equal and consecutive sentence for the use of a deadly weapon.” The same opinion settled which version an old crime gets: “crimes are punishable in accord with the law in force at the time a crime is committed unless the Legislature clearly expresses its intent to the contrary.”
So the sentence came in two halves that had to match. “As to the first-degree murder portion, you are sentenced to 20 years to life,” Kierny told Davis. “As to the deadly weapon enhancement, you are sentenced to a mandatory consecutive 20 years to life.”
The arithmetic is ours. Forty years from Tuesday is October 13, 2066. Subtract the 731 days of credit Kierny granted, and the earliest date a parole board could free him falls in October 2064. Davis is 63. He would be 101. Under the enhancement as it reads today, the same verdict could have put that date as early as 2045, when he would be 82.
The Only Fight Was Over the Top Number
Nobody in the courtroom disputed the floor. Sanft asked for 40 to 100 years and said his client “understands he’s doing 40 years on the bottom.” The prosecutor asked for “the maximum possible sentence,” put no number on it, and conceded the rest: “There is no difference really from 40 to 100 to 40 to life as it relates to Mr. Davis.” Whatever Kierny chose, he said, Davis “is guaranteed, assuming he gets no relief anywhere else, to die in the Nevada Department of Corrections.”
Two early accounts lose that. The BBC’s headline has Davis “sentenced to 40 years,” which is the minimum of a life term. NBC News reported that the sentence “includes a 20-year mandatory enhancement for profiting off the murder.” Kierny named it from the bench as the deadly weapon enhancement. Profit was the prosecutor’s argument for severity (“He’s the only one who’s trying to profit off a killing that he committed”). The 20 years came from the gun.
The credit was the one number Davis contested. He has been in custody since his arrest on September 29, 2023, which is 1,110 days by our count, and he told Kierny that 731 was too few. “A lot of those days, Mr. Davis, did go to the other case that you served time on,” she answered. The other case is a jail fight, for which a different Clark County judge gave him 16 to 40 months in September 2025. That leaves 379 days the law would not let her count.
Did Duane Davis fire the shots that killed Tupac Shakur?
No, and prosecutors never said he did. Their case was that Davis, then a leader of the South Side Compton Crips, supplied the gun and gave the order from the front seat of a white Cadillac, hours after Shakur’s group beat his nephew, Orlando Anderson, at the MGM Grand. Davis has said Anderson fired. Anderson denied involvement and was killed in an unrelated shooting in 1998.
Is Davis appealing?
Yes. He told Kierny so before she sentenced him, and Sanft said the defense will seek appellate relief. Our account of the verdict explains why the conviction rests on Davis’s own statements.
Has anyone else been charged in Tupac Shakur’s murder?
No. Davis is the only person ever charged, and the three other men he placed in the Cadillac are dead: Anderson in 1998, Deandrae Smith in 2004 and Terrence Brown in 2015.
A Just Sentence at the End of a Case Davis Solved Himself
We think Kierny got this right, and that the argument over 100 years versus life was ceremony, as the prosecutor all but said. A man convicted of orchestrating the killing of a 25-year-old, who then retold it on television and in a memoir, will die in prison under any reading of Tuesday’s order.
The sentence does not redeem the 30 years. Arguing for severity, the prosecutor said Davis had punished the Shakur family “from 2018 till 2023 publicly grandstanding in the death of Tupac Shakur.” That is five years of public confession before an arrest. The state’s own explanation, which Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo gave the jury in closing, was that it “had to eat crow and allow a murderer to live in Henderson” because of a deal Las Vegas authorities did not control. Sanft answered on Tuesday that blaming Davis for those years is “a disingenuous argument” from prosecutors who “purposely delayed.”
We have covered the immunity promise the jury was asked to weigh and how much of the case was built from Davis’s own words. Clark County did not catch him. He told on himself, in interviews and in a book with a price on it, and the system needed half a decade to act.
We expect the appeal to be built from that deal and that delay. The 40 gives it nothing to work with. If the Nevada Supreme Court lets the verdict stand, the next date on this case’s calendar is in October 2064.