When Judge Carli Kierny asked Duane "Keffe D" Davis whether he wished to say anything before sentencing, the answer was almost insultingly brief: "I'm good." He added, with the flat assurance of a man discussing a parking fine, that he would certainly appeal. It was a curious coda to a case that had outlasted presidencies, record labels and several generations of conspiracy theorists, and it fell to the family of the victim to supply the emotion that the defendant withheld. Sekyiwa Shakur, the rapper's sister, told the court that the loss of Tupac had "crippled" her family for years, and that he had carried "intentions for a better world", including a hope of helping the neighbourhoods he came from.

She urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence, predicting that Davis would sit in prison contemplating what he had done to the world. Her brother Maurice made the same plea. Kierny, for her part, spoke less like a bureaucrat than a witness to history: no one, she said, gets to take a man's life and his entire future and simply walk away, "especially when that man is Tupac Shakur". The irony at the heart of the prosecution is that Davis largely convicted himself.

In 2008, shielded by an immunity agreement, he told police about his part in the 1996 shooting, having been questioned over the killing of The Notorious B.I.G. Then, in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, and in a run of media interviews, he kept talking, and in doing so voided the very protection that had kept him free.

His defence argued that it was all bravado, fiction written to sell books. Prosecutors answered that although the former Compton Crips leader never fired the gun, he supplied it and ordered the killing. Shakur was 25 and had already sold more than 75 million records worldwide.