LAS VEGAS (AP) — An ex-gang leader is seeking to have all the charges against him dismissed in the 1990s killing of rap music icon Tupac Shakur.
Attorney Carl Arnold filed the motion on Monday in the District Court of Nevada to dismiss charges against Duane Davis in the 1996 shooting of Shakur. The motion alleges “egregious” constitutional violations because of a 27-year delay in prosecution. The motion also asserts a lack of corroborating evidence and failure to honor immunity agreements granted to Davis by federal and local authorities.
“The prosecution has failed to justify a decades-long delay that has irreversibly prejudiced my client," Arnold said in a news release. "Moreover, the failure to honor immunity agreements undermines the criminal justice system’s integrity and seriously questions this prosecution.”
Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the filing. He has said evidence against Davis is strong and it will be up to a jury to decide the credibility of Davis’ accounts of the shooting including those in a 2019 memoir.
Davis is originally from Compton, California. He was arrested in the case in September 2023 near Las Vegas. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and has sought to be released since shortly after his arrest.
Davis is accused of orchestrating and enabling the 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’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.
Authorities have said that the gunfire stemmed from competition between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast groups of a Crips sect, including Davis, for dominance in a genre known at the time as “gangsta rap.”
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-caliber 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 didn’t identify Anderson as the shooter.
Shakur died a week later in a nearby hospital. He was 25. Knight survived and is serving a 28-year prison sentence in connection with the killing of a Compton man in 2015.
Anderson denied involvement in Shakur’s death and died in 1998 at age 23 in a shooting in Compton. The other two men in the car are also dead.
A Las Vegas police detective testified 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.
FILE - Duane "Keffe D" Davis arrives in Clark County District Court, Nov. 7, 2023, in Las Vegas. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
FILE - Rapper Tupac Shakur attends a voter registration event in South Central Los Angeles, Aug. 15, 1996. (AP Photo/Frank Wiese, File)
Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced changes to content moderation on Facebook and Instagram long sought by conservatives. Incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was “probably” due to threats he made against the technology mogul.
The move to replace third-party fact-checking with user-written “community notes” similar to those on Trump backer Elon Musk’s social platform X is the latest example of a media company moving to accommodate the incoming administration. It comes on the four-year anniversary of Zuckerberg banning Trump from his platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Zuckerberg has been a target of Trump and his allies since he donated $400 million to help local officials run the 2020 election during the coronavirus pandemic. Those donations became part of a false narrative that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump, although there has never been any evidence of widespread fraud or problems that would have changed that result. Nonetheless, Republican-controlled states have banned future donations to local elections offices and Trump himself threatened to imprison Zuckerberg in a book published in September, during the peak of the presidential campaign.
Zuckerberg released a video Tuesday using some of the language that conservatives have long used to criticize his platforms, saying it was time to prioritize “free expression” and that fact-checkers had become “politically biased.” Zuckerberg said he is moving Meta's content moderation team from California, a blue state, to red state Texas, and lifting restrictions on some immigration and gender discussions. Meta had no immediate comment on how many people might be relocated.
At a press conference hours later, Trump praised the changes.
“I think they've come a long way, Meta,” Trump said. When asked if he believed Zuckerberg made the changes in response to threats the incoming president has made, Trump responded: “Probably.”
Meta is among several tech companies apparently working to get in Trump’s good graces before he takes office later this month. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in December, and Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Zuckerberg this week also appointed a key Trump ally, Ultimate Fighting Championship chief executive Dana White, to Meta's board. Amazon announced a documentary on incoming first lady Melania Trump. ABC News, which is owned by Disney, last month settled a libel suit filed by Trump with a $15 million payment to Trump's presidential library foundation.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, called the Meta changes part of “a pattern of powerful people and institutions kowtowing to the president in a way that suggests they're fearful of being targeted.”
Nyhan said that's a grave risk to the country.
“We have in many ways an economy that's the envy of the world and people come here to start businesses because they don't have to be aligned with the governing regime like they do in the rest of the world,” Nyhan said. “That's being called into question.”
Except for YouTube, Meta's Facebook is by far the most used social media platform in the U.S. According to the Pew Research Center, about 68% of American adults use Facebook, a number that has largely held steady since 2016. Teenagers, however, have fled Facebook over the past decade, with just 32% reporting they used it in a 2024 survey.
Meta began fact checks in December 2016, after Trump was elected to his first term, in response to criticism that “fake news” was spreading on its platforms. For years, the tech giant boasted it was working with more than 100 organizations in over 60 languages to combat misinformation.
The Associated Press ended its participation in Meta’s fact-checking program a year ago.
Media experts and those who study social media were aghast at Meta's policy shift.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s fact-checking program not only removes a valuable resource for users, but it also provides an air of legitimacy to a popular disinformation narrative: That fact-checking is politically biased. Fact-checkers provide a valuable service by adding important context to the viral claims that mislead and misinform millions of users on Meta,” said Dan Evon, lead writer for RumorGuard, the News Literacy Project’s digital tool that curates fact checks and teaches people to spot viral misinformation.
Business analysts saw it as an openly political gambit.
“Meta is repositioning the company for the incoming Trump administration,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. "The move will elate conservatives, who’ve often criticized Meta for censoring speech, but it will spook many liberals and advertisers, showing just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go to win Trump’s approval.”
X's approach to content moderation has led to the loss of some advertisers, but Enberg said Meta’s “massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulate it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus.” Even so, she said, any major drop in user engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business.
Meta's quasi-independent Oversight Board, which acts as a referee of controversial content decisions, said it welcomes the changes and looks forward to working with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”
On X, Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, called Meta's move a “huge step in the right direction.”
Others in the GOP were skeptical.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Rep. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, wrote on X. “Can any of us assume Zuckerberg won’t return to his old tricks?”
Zuckerberg is not registered with any political party but was once seen as a champion of liberal causes. He invested heavily in supporting an immigration overhaul and defending the rights of those brought to the U.S. illegally as children to remain in the country. His efforts to fact-check content on Facebook made him a longtime target of conservative suspicions. When he made his election donation in 2020 he framed it as a nonpartisan, civic act, but quickly ran afoul of widespread distrust on the right.
Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and a former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the change is “a choice of politics, not policy,” and warned: "Depending on how this is applied, the consequences of this decision will be an increase in harassment, hate speech and other harmful behavior across billion-user platforms.”
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump stands on stage with former first lady Melania Trump, family members and Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, during the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
FILE - An "X" sign rests atop the company's headquarters in downtown San Francisco on July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)
FILE - Elon Musk speaks at Life Center Church in Harrisburg, Pa., on Oct. 19, 2024. (Sean Simmers/The Patriot-News via AP, File)
FILE - Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
