LAS VEGAS (AP) — A choose on Tuesday once more rejected a request to free an ailing former Los Angeles-area gang chief forward of his homicide trial within the 1996 killing of hip-hop star Tupac Shakur, saying she suspects a cover-up associated to the supply of the funds for his bond.

The choice from Clark District Court docket Decide Carli Kierny got here after an lawyer for Duane “Keffe D” Davis stated he would offer further information to show that the music file government providing to underwrite Davis’ $750,000 bail had obtained the cash legally. However Kierny stated she was skeptical after receiving two an identical letters apparently from an leisure firm that Money “Wack 100” Jones says wired him the funds as fee for his work.

One letter was signed with a reputation that has no ties to the corporate, the choose stated, whereas the second letter included a misspelled title and a return tackle tied to a health care provider’s workplace.

“I’ve a way that issues are attempting to be lined up,” Kierny stated.

The listening to took a flip when Davis’ lawyer, Carl Arnold, informed the choose that the bail bond agent utilized by Davis had supplied the leisure firm with copy-and-paste directions on the language for the letters and will due to this fact testify about their legitimacy.

In a scathing response, prosecutor Binu Palal stated the bond supplier might have dedicated a felony crime by submitting “a false doc to this courtroom.”

“The state takes that very critically,” he stated. “Be suggested that it’s going to not go uninvestigated.”

Each Palal and Arnold declined to remark additional.

Davis has sought to be launched since shortly after his September 2023 arrest, which made him the one particular person ever to be charged in considered one of hip-hop’s most enduring mysteries. He has pleaded not responsible to first-degree homicide.

Additionally Tuesday, Kierny pushed again the beginning of Davis’ trial from Nov. 4 to March 17.

Kierny beforehand rejected Davis’ bid to have Jones put up $112,500 for his launch to accommodate arrest. Including to her considerations, she stated on the time, was the query of whether or not the pair deliberate to revenue by promoting Davis’ life story.

Nevada has a legislation, typically known as a “slayer statute,” that prohibits convicted killers from making the most of their crimes.

Jones, who has managed artists together with Johnathan “Blueface” Porter and Jayceon “The Recreation” Taylor, testified in June that he needed to assist Davis as a result of he was combating most cancers and had “at all times been a monumental particular person in our group … particularly the city group.”

Davis himself has stated in interviews and in his 2019 tell-all memoir that he’s the solely dwelling suspect within the deadly drive-by taking pictures of Shakur almost 28 years in the past at a visitors mild close to the Las Vegas Strip.

Authorities say that the gunfire stemmed from competitors between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast teams of a Crips sect, together with Davis, for dominance in a style identified on the time as “gangsta rap.”