Thirty years is a long time for a question to go unanswered, and yet on a Thursday morning in a Los Angeles courtroom, the killing of Tupac Shakur — the rapper whose voice became, for millions of listeners across the Americas and beyond, a kind of scripture — felt startlingly close. Prosecutors played a 2008 recording in which Duane Davis, the man now on trial, spoke to detectives Daryn Dupree and Greg Kading with a candour that has since come back to haunt him. "Yeah, if we would've been on my side, I would've blasted," Davis said, his words read aloud from a transcript that hung in the courtroom air like smoke. The night in question was 7 September 1996, when a Cadillac carrying Davis pulled alongside the car in which Shakur was travelling through Las Vegas.

Prosecutors argue that the attack was a calculated response to a brawl earlier that same evening, in which Davis's nephew, Orlando Anderson, had been beaten at a casino. In Davis's own memoir, co-authored in 2019 under the title Compton Street Legend, he wrote that Anderson's humiliation had given the group "the ultimate green light." The memoir also placed Davis inside the vehicle at the moment the shots were fired, claiming he threw the murder weapon into the back seat. Anderson, who denied any involvement until his death, cannot speak for himself.

The trial has grown considerably more complicated, however, by the memoir's contested authorship. Davis has argued that portions of the book were fictionalised by co-writers in order to improve its commercial appeal, a claim his lawyer Michael Sanft has used to challenge every self-incriminating statement his client ever made. The 2008 police interview, meanwhile, was originally conducted under an informal use agreement — a protection that prosecutors contend Davis himself dissolved when he chose to go public.