Second day underway in trial of gang leader accused over Tupac Shakur's 1996 killing

The murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a 63-year-old former leader of the South Side Compton Crips gang, entered its second day in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Davis faces a single count of murder with a deadly weapon over the 1996 shooting death of rapper Tupac Shakur. Prosecutors contend Davis helped orchestrate the shooting, though they do not allege he was the gunman. Davis has pleaded not guilty.

Proceedings resumed with continued playback of a lengthy archival audio recording from a 1997 interview between Davis and Fred Miller, a former Los Angeles police detective who had investigated Davis in relation to the 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as Biggie Smalls or the Notorious B.I.G.

As was reported from the trial's opening day, Davis had been present at a party Wallace attended shortly before Wallace was shot. However, Davis's defense attorney stressed that Davis was never charged in connection with Wallace's death, and the presiding judge told the jury that law enforcement did not consider Davis a suspect in that case.

Jurors also heard brief testimony from Thomas Kern, who worked as a crime scene analyst for the Las Vegas police department in 1996 and was present during Shakur's autopsy. Kern's role in court was to authenticate evidence collected during the autopsy, and he was not cross-examined by the defense.

The trial comes nearly three decades after Shakur's killing, which has long remained one of the most high-profile unsolved cases in hip-hop history until Davis's arrest brought new scrutiny to the case.