A judge in Nevada declined on Tuesday to release a man who was charged with the murder of the rapper Tupac Shakur after expressing concern that the money provided to bail him out from jail could be connected to a possible deal to tell his story in a TV series.
The man, Duane Keith Davis, known as Keffe D, has said for years that he was a critical player in the gang-orchestrated shooting of the rapper, drawing scrutiny from prosecutors nearly three decades after the killing. A grand jury indicted Mr. Davis on one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon last year.
Mr. Davis has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer has said that those admissions of responsibility — which he made in a memoir and in videotaped interviews — were “for entertainment purposes” under the belief that he had been granted immunity from prosecution.
Judge Carli Kierny of the Eighth Judicial District Court in Nevada declined to release Mr. Davis after a dispute over the source of the funds that would have been used for bail.
Prosecutors had opposed his release, pointing to an interview on YouTube in which the man who posted the bail bond premium of about $112,000 said he would help out only if Mr. Davis agreed to do a TV series with him.
“This is him getting paid from his retelling of his criminal past,” Binu Palal, one of the prosecutors overseeing the case, said at a court hearing in June.
The man who posted the bond premium, a rap manager named Cash Jones, denied that there were real plans for a series featuring Mr. Davis, saying in court that it was just “a thought” that he had shared with the YouTube interviewer DJ Vlad for entertainment.
“At the end of the day it’s astounding to me that a blog could be admitted in court when it’s just that, it’s just entertainment,” Mr. Jones, who is known by the nickname Wack100, said at the hearing. He said he had put up the money as a gift to help his friend.
Judge Kierny had asked for proof that the bail money was legitimate, but she was not persuaded.
Mr. Davis’s lawyer, Carl Arnold, has pushed for his release, citing the defendant’s cancer history and his need to maintain proper medical care and a healthy diet. He has questioned why Mr. Davis needed to be incarcerated for a shooting that occurred in 1996.
“If Duane is so dangerous, and the evidence so overwhelming,” Mr. Arnold wrote in court papers, “why did it wait 15 years to arrest Duane for the murder of Tupac Shakur?”
In 2008, Mr. Davis gave his account of Mr. Shakur’s murder to law enforcement officials in what he has described as a proffer agreement, in which officials promised not to prosecute him based on what he told them. (Prosecutors have said they have been unable to locate such an agreement.)
Prosecutors have accused Mr. Davis of directing Mr. Shakur’s killing after a gang feud boiled over at a Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon prizefight in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996.
After Mr. Shakur and his associates beat up a rival at the MGM Grand, prosecutors said in court papers, Mr. Davis acquired a gun “for the purpose of hunting down” the rapper and the leader of Mr. Shakur’s record label, Suge Knight. In court papers, prosecutors have frequently cited Mr. Davis’s memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” in which he said the beating at the hotel “gave us the ultimate green light to do something” to Mr. Shakur and his associates.
Mr. Davis’s trial, which the judge rescheduled for March, is likely to hinge in part on whether jurors consider his memoir and recorded interviews as legitimate admissions of guilt. His lawyer has contended that they are not, writing in court papers that “it is obvious that parts of the book are fiction and dramatized to make the book more marketable.”
Read More: Man Charged With Tupac Shakur’s Murder Loses Bid for Release
