LAS VEGAS.- A judge set a Tuesday bail of $750,000 for a former gang leader from the area los angeles accused of orchestrating the murder from the hip hop legend Tupac Shakur in 1996 and said he can serve house arrest with electronic monitoring before his trial in June.
Court-appointed attorneys for Duane “Keffe D” Davis told The Associated Press after the hearing in Las Vegas that they believe he can post bail. They had asked for bail of no more than $100,000.
The lawyers argued, in a court filing a day earlier, that their client, not the witnesses, as prosecutors had said, faced danger. And they noted that their 60-year-old client is in poor health after battling cancer, from which she is in remission, and that she will not flee to avoid trial.
“We believe he can post bail,” public defender Robert Arroyo said after Tuesday’s hearing.
Attorneys accused prosecutors of misinterpreting a jailhouse phone recording and a list of names provided to Davis’ relatives, and of wrongly informing the judge that Davis poses a threat to the public if he were released.
“Davis never threatened anyone during the phone calls,” Arroyo and Charles Cano, special deputy public defenders, said in their seven-page filing Monday. “Furthermore, (prosecutors’) interpretation of a ‘green light’ is completely wrong.”
The call
The green light reference comes from a recording of an October jail call that prosecutors Marc DiGiacomo and Binu Palal provided last month to Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny, who presided over the bond hearing.
The prosecution’s presentation made no reference to Davis instructing someone to harm another person, or to anyone associated with the case being physically harmed. But prosecutors noted that: “In (Davis’) world, a ‘green light’ is an authorization to kill.”
“Duane’s son said he heard there was a green light for Duane’s family,” Davis’ attorneys wrote, using his first name. “Duane obviously didn’t know what his son was talking about.”
Davis’ attorneys also used his first name Monday, asking Kierny to consider what they called “the obvious question.”
“If Duane is so dangerous and the evidence so overwhelming,” they wrote, “why did (police and prosecutors) wait 15 years to arrest Duane for the murder of Tupac Shakur?”
Prosecutors point to Davis’s own words from 2008, in police interviews, in a 2019 memoir and in the media, which they say provide strong evidence that he orchestrated the September 1996 shooting.
Davis’ lawyers argue that his descriptions of Shakur’s murder were: “made for entertainment purposes and to make money.”
Duane “Keffe D” Davis
Davis, originally from Compton, California, is the only person still alive who was in the car from which Shakur was shot in a shootout that also wounded rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight. Knight is now serving 28 years in a California prison for an unrelated fatal shooting in the Los Angeles area in 2015.
Davis’ attorneys noted Monday that Knight is an eyewitness to Shakur’s shooting but did not testify to the grand jury that he charged Davis before his Sept. 29 arrest outside his Henderson home. Las Vegas police went to the house with a search warrant in mid-July.
Davis has pleaded not guilty to murder and has been held without bail at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, where detainees’ phone calls are routinely recorded. If he is found guilty at trial, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Davis maintains that a task force of the FBI and Los Angeles police granted him immunity from possible prosecution in 2008 when they investigated the murders of Shakur in Las Vegas and rival rapper Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious BIG or Biggie Smalls, which occurred six months later in Los Angeles.
DiGiacomo and Palal say any immunity agreement was limited. Last week, they presented the court with an audio recording of a Dec. 18, 2008, task force interview during which they said Davis “was specifically told that what he stated in the room would not be used against him.” , but (that) if he talked to other people, that could put him in danger.”
Davis’ lawyers responded Monday with a reference to the publication 12 years ago of a book written by former Los Angeles police detective Greg Kading, who attended those interviews.
“Duane is not concerned,” the lawyers said, “because his alleged involvement in Shakur’s death has been public since… 2011.”
FUENTE: AP
