Overview
- Judge Carli Kierny ruled Tuesday, June 30, that Duane “Keffe D” Davis’s 2019 memoir and his 2008–2009 police statements are admissible in the upcoming trial.
- Davis, 63, is charged with murder with a deadly weapon and intent to promote or assist a criminal gang and has pleaded not guilty; the jury trial is scheduled to start Aug. 10, 2026.
- The defense argued the memoir was fictionalized or ghostwritten and that earlier interviews were involuntary or protected by a proffer, but the judge found Davis had publicly adopted the book’s account and that an attorney was present during the police talks.
- Prosecutors contend Davis organized the drive-by shooting as retaliation in a feud between the South Side Compton Crips and the Mob Piru, tying the attack to a 1996 altercation involving Davis’s nephew Orlando Anderson, Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight.
- The court denied a request to fully sequester the jury but approved a limited “part and parcel” sequestration, and the admissibility rulings mean jurors will likely hear Davis’s own public accounts when the trial begins.