Lawyers for a former gang leader accused of organising the killing of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur in 1996 have told a court he should be released.
Duane Davis, 60, is due to stand trial in June and his lawyers want him to be allowed to leave prison to be instead be held under house arrest.
In court filings ahead of a bail hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for Davis accused prosecutors of misinterpreting a jail telephone recording made of a call to his family.
In it the phrase "green light" and names were mentioned. The prosecution claim this was giving the go ahead to threats against individuals.
But Davis "never threatened anyone during the phone calls", deputy special public defenders Robert Arroyo and Charles Cano said in their seven-page filing.
"Furthermore, (prosecutors’) interpretation of the use of ‘green light’ is flat-out wrong."
The "green light" reference is from a recording of an October jail call. The defence claim the green light referred to threats against Davis's family.
The defence added: "If Duane is so dangerous, and the evidence so overwhelming," they wrote, "why did (police and prosecutors) wait 15 years to arrest Duane for the murder of Tupac Shakur?"
However, prosecutors point to Davis’ own words since 2008 in a memoir and interviews with the media and police indicating that he orchestrated the killing.
Davis’ attorneys argue that his descriptions of Shakur’s killing were "done for entertainment purposes and to make money".
Davis, originally from Compton, California, is the only person still alive who was in the car from which shots were fired in the drive-by shooting that also wounded rap music mogul Marion "Suge" Knight.
Knight is now serving 28 years in a California prison for an unrelated fatal shooting in the Los Angeles area in 2015.
