Keefe D walked into a Las Vegas courtroom already damned by his own words, but his attorney, Michael Sanft, says the real crime happened long before the jury reached its verdict.
The investigation into Tupac’s 1996 murder was fundamentally broken from the start, Sanft argues, and police never bothered to follow the most obvious leads.
For three decades, detectives had tunnel vision, focusing exclusively on Davis while ignoring other suspects who had just as much reason to want the rapper dead.
Sanft, who took the case pro bono after another attorney asked for his help, told reporters that jurors came into the trial with the right mindset but ultimately failed to challenge the prosecution’s core assumptions.
“They were inquisitive, but my problem is that I don’t believe they stood up at the end,” Sanft said. “I think what they did is they sort of just allowed this to happen this way without challenging the premises that everyone else had.” The jury deliberated for about three hours before convicting Davis of first-degree murder with intent to promote a criminal gang.
The defense attorney’s biggest frustration centers on one critical piece of evidence that police completely ignored.
Multiple people owned white Cadillacs in Las Vegas during 1996, and some of those people had clear motives to eliminate Tupac.
“What I’ll tell you flat out is that there is evidence out there of ownership of Cadillacs that was never looked into by people that had some motive here to get rid of Tupac Shakur,” Sanft stated.
The white Cadillac that pulled up alongside Tupac’s black BMW at a red light on September 7, 1996, was a four-door, late-model vehicle.
Two Metro police officers working overtime outside Suge Knight’s gated home that night testified they saw a white Cadillac enter and exit the premises, yet investigators never pursued the owners of similar vehicles or why.
Sanft challenged jurors to find any evidence outside Davis’ own statements placing him in Las Vegas or inside that Cadillac on the night of the shooting.
The prosecution couldn’t produce the murder weapon, couldn’t identify who rented the vehicle, and had no tangible documentation that Davis was even in the city.
Yet the jury convicted him anyway.
According to 8 News Now, Sanft believes the investigation’s failures and legal motions lost before trial created an impossible situation for the defense.
Lead detective Cliff Mogg took years to file an official police report and never testified at trial, a detail that underscores how poorly this case was handled from the beginning.
Sanft has 25 years of criminal defense experience and even traveled to Compton to research the neighborhoods connected to the case.
His strategy was straightforward: tell jurors that Davis is a liar who fabricated stories to sell books and gain notoriety.
The jury didn’t buy it, but Sanft’s post-trial comments reveal a system that failed to investigate Tupac’s murder thoroughly.
Davis remains in custody at Clark County Detention Center facing life in prison, with sentencing scheduled for October 13, when Judge Carli Kierny will determine his fate.
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