Nearly thirty years after Tupac Shakur was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip, the question of who fired the fatal shots has finally reached a jury. This week, jurors heard a 2008 police recording in which Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the 63-year-old former South Side Compton Crips leader now on trial for orchestrating the murder, admitted that his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, was the shooter 11. The prosecution’s case rests on Davis’s own words, captured long before he was charged, a rare instance of an alleged mastermind narrating his own crime into an evidence locker. Davis has pleaded not guilty 11, and the defense will surely argue that a gang leader’s boast is not the same as a legal confession. But the tape places the jury in an uncomfortable position: believing a man’s own account of a killing he says he helped arrange, while weighing the credibility of a witness with every reason to minimize his role 1.
The trial is a study in delayed justice, and it casts a long shadow over the other crime stories of the day. In Massachusetts, another jury is weighing a different kind of culpability. Lindsay Clancy, the nurse who admitted to strangling her three children in January 2023, has seen her defense rest after presenting psychologists who testified she was not criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder 710. The defense’s ten witnesses painted a portrait of a woman who could not distinguish right from wrong; the prosecution will argue that she did, and that the killings were the act of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. The trial has drawn supporters in pink to the courthouse 10, a visible reminder that the public’s sympathy is as divided as the legal arguments.
Across the Atlantic, the machinery of justice grinds on with less spectacle but no less consequence. In Bolivia, a judge ordered Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo held for 180 days of pretrial detention, investigating him for the attempted femicide of his ex-partner, lawyer Nadia Beller, who was shot three times outside a hotel 5. In Mexico, retired Rear Admiral Fernando Farías Laguna was repatriated from Argentina to face charges over an alleged maritime fuel-smuggling network, flown to the maximum-security Altiplano prison on a Navy jet 4. These are cases where the accused are powerful men, and the question is not whether they acted, but whether the state can hold them.
The most unsettling story of the day may be the one with the least context. In Fagersta, central Sweden, an 18-year-old former student entered Brinellskolan with a sword, killing a 17-year-old girl and wounding three others before police shot him in the leg and detained him 36. Police are investigating whether the attacker was influenced by online networks 6, a phrase that now carries its own weight of dread. The attack is a reminder that violence can be both intimate and inexplicable, a former student returning to a school he knew, armed with a weapon that belongs to another century.
What connects these cases is not the crimes themselves but the aftermath. Each one asks the same question: what do we do with the person who did this? Davis sits in a Las Vegas courtroom, his own voice condemning him. Clancy’s fate rests on whether a jury believes her mind betrayed her. Cerimedo waits in a Bolivian prison. The Swedish suspect faces murder charges. The answer, in each case, is that we build a trial, we present evidence, and we ask twelve people to decide. It is an imperfect system, but it is the only one we have. The lingering consequence is not the verdict, but the wait.