Keffe D’s Lawyer Found Dead in Las Vegas a Week After Filing the Tupac Appeal

Michael Sanft, the Las Vegas defense attorney who represented Duane “Keffe D” Davis in the Tupac Shakur murder trial, was found dead at his home on Friday, a spokesperson for the Clark County Coroner’s Office confirmed to USA TODAY. He was 55.

His cause of death is pending, and no further details have been released. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police referred questions about the death to the coroner’s office, and USA TODAY said it has reached out to Sanft’s law firm for comment.

The case that put him in front of the country

Sanft served as lead counsel for Davis, the only person ever charged in connection with Shakur’s killing. He took the case pro bono after Davis’s previous counsel withdrew, and his defense argued that the police investigation behind the charge was flawed. A jury convicted Davis in late August of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, for facilitating the 1996 drive-by shooting that killed Shakur in Las Vegas. In October, Davis, 63, was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.

The appeal he leaves behind

At the sentencing, Sanft said he intended to appeal the conviction, and court records obtained by USA TODAY show he filed a notice of appeal on Oct. 30 — one week before his death. The appeal was the next phase of the case, and Sanft was the lawyer carrying it.

After the sentencing, he described the fight ahead in an interview with FOX5. “We had the best team possible in this case, from the motion practice work on this appeal to our investigator to our firm here at SOS Injury. We all did our part. I don’t see what I could’ve done differently,” he said. It was Davis, he added, who steadied him after the verdict: “He had reminded me this is phase one… Mr. Davis was the one who said, ‘Don’t worry about it, man, this is the first phase.’”

No replacement counsel has been named. The notice of appeal is on file and the process can continue with new counsel, but as of Friday no lawyer had been announced to take it over. Davis remains in prison, serving the 40-years-to-life sentence, nearly 30 years after the shooting that made his case one of the most closely watched in hip-hop history.

A Las Vegas trial lawyer

Sanft grew up in Tonga and moved with his family to San Diego when he was 12, according to his biography at SOS Injury Lawyers. He attended BYU-Hawaii and earned his law degree at Brigham Young University. Over the course of his career he tried more than 150 cases to jury verdict, and at the time of his death he was SOS Injury Lawyers’ lead trial attorney.