Davis’s own words proved the strongest evidence against him
The breakthrough in finally solving the Shakur case largely came down to one thing: Davis’s own words. Through documentaries, his own memoir, podcasts, and a secret police interview, Davis acknowledged his role in Shakur’s death. Davis said he tossed a firearm in the backseat of a car and that his nephew, Orlando Anderson, used the gun to fatally shoot Shakur as the vehicle pulled up alongside Shakur’s car in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996.
Anderson was shot dead in 1998, having denied killing Shakur. During Davis’s trial, there were no eyewitnesses to place Davis in the car, no murder weapon presented, and no video or photo evidence. Davis’s defense team went as far as to argue there was not even proof that he was in Las Vegas that night.
Trial attorney Shaun Kent said the case evolved with each interview and moment that Davis decided to open his mouth and talk about the case more. “There are no other witnesses, besides him,” Kent told the BBC before the trial. “The strongest witness against him — is him.”
Defense attorney Michael Sanft asked the jury, before they returned their guilty verdict, to discredit his client as a liar who told tales to sell books and make money. “There’s no proof,” he argued.
Former prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the BBC that Davis would “go down as one of the world’s dumbest criminals,” and likely would never have faced charges if he had stayed silent. Rahmani said Davis could not stop himself from continuing to speak about the case even after he was taken into custody. “Even when he was arrested and in custody, he was giving interviews,” Rahmani said.
Rahmani called the decision to charge Davis a “gutsy” one for prosecutors — an “uphill climb” on a case that many observers expected to be unwinnable. “Look, when you’re a prosecutor, you’re expected to win every time,” Rahmani said. “They made a difficult decision to charge a case that a lot of people thought might be a loser. And they got justice, where other people didn’t even bother trying.”
When the guilty verdict was read in court, Shakur’s family reacted with tears. Some cried and wiped their faces with tissues. Others hugged and held hands, and one family member embraced one of the prosecutors in the case.
Davis promised to appeal.
Why the verdict is drawing new attention to the Biggie case
The conviction has prompted fresh questions about a second unsolved killing from the same era — the March 9, 1997 shooting death of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, in Los Angeles.
Wallace was leaving an after-party for the Soul Train Music Awards when a black Chevrolet pulled up to his vehicle at a red light and opened fire. The attack came almost exactly six months after the drive-by that killed Shakur. Both men were Grammy-nominated artists at the top of their genre, and both occupied the leading edges of an East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry that had spilled from lyrics into threats and physical violence. Both shootings led to no arrests and no convictions in the years that followed, leaving behind rumors, conspiracy theories, and gang violence in Los Angeles as street groups sought to hold one another accountable in the aftermath.
Davis knew Wallace and was at the same party the night Wallace was killed. The investigator who interviewed Davis after Wallace’s killing testified at the Davis trial.
Rahmani described the LAPD’s record on the Wallace killing in blunt terms. “It’s really a stain on the LAPD,” he said. “The fact that this could happen and not a single arrest was made and no one was prosecuted.” He noted that Wallace was killed on a public street in the middle of the second-most-populous U.S. city. Rahmani suggested that the Shakur conviction might encourage prosecutors in Los Angeles to revisit the case. “Prosecutors don’t like to lose and tend to be a little gun shy,” he said. “But maybe this will embolden folks in Los Angeles to maybe take another look at it, a cold case that’s coming up on 30 years.”
The Los Angeles Police Department, asked about the cases, told the BBC it was aware of the Davis conviction and that the investigation into Wallace’s killing remained active. “The murder of Christopher Wallace remains an open, unsolved case within LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division,” Lt. Elpidio Orozco said, urging anyone with tips to call authorities.
A trial shaped by 1990s gang violence and a code of silence
Much of the Shakur trial required the jury to place themselves back in the 1990s, a period of intense gang violence that had taken root in hip-hop and in the rivalries between East Coast and West Coast rappers. It was also a period of deep-rooted mistrust in policing and of a street code that forbade informing on others to authorities.
Shakur himself refused to cooperate after being hit multiple times in the drive-by shooting that would later kill him. As an officer tried to question him in the ambulance about who had shot him, Shakur said, “We’ll take care of it.” The same code of silence echoed months later in the response to Wallace’s killing.