A lawyer speaking for the former street gang leader charged with killing rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996 has said he sees “obvious defences” in the murder case in Las Vegas.
“There’s no gun, there’s no car and there’s no witnesses from 27 years ago,” lawyer Ross Goodman told reporters after the briefest of court hearings, at which he told a Nevada judge he was close to being hired to represent Duane “Keffe D” Davis.
Clark County District Judge Tierra Jones gave Davis and Mr Goodman two weeks to reach agreement, saying she wants to “get this case moving”.
She reset Davis’s arraignment for November 2.
Mr Goodman told reporters that although he does not yet represent Davis, he expects Davis will plead not guilty and seek release from jail pending trial.
Clark County district attorney Steve Wolfson did not respond to messages about Mr Goodman’s comments.
Davis, 60, is being held at the Clark County Detention Centre in Las Vegas without bail.
He is originally from Compton, California.
Davis was arrested on September 29 outside a home in suburban Henderson where Mr Goodman said he has lived for more than a decade.
Davis told police that he moved there in January because his wife was involved in opening grocery stores in Nevada.
He is accused of orchestrating and enabling a drive-by shooting that killed Shakur and wounded rap music mogul Marion “Suge” Knight after a brawl at a Las Vegas Strip casino involving Shakur and Davis’s nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.
In interviews and a 2019 tell-all memoir that described his life as a leader of a Crips gang sect in Compton, Davis said he obtained a .40-calibre handgun and handed it to Anderson in the back seat of a car from which he and authorities say shots were fired at Shakur and Knight in another car at an intersection near the Las Vegas Strip.
Davis did not identify Anderson as the shooter.
Shakur, 25, died a week later in a nearby hospital.
Knight was wounded but survived.
Now 58, Knight is serving a 28-year prison sentence for the death of a Compton businessman in 2015.
Anderson denied involvement in Shakur’s death and died in May 1998 aged 23 in a shooting in Compton.
The other two men in the car are also dead.
A Las Vegas police detective gave evidence to a grand jury that police do not have the gun that was used to shoot at Shakur and Knight, nor did they find the vehicle from which shots were fired.
