Tucson and Pima County officials apparently are considering settling financially with Louis Taylor over his imprisonment in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire case after a judge recently ordered that his discrimination lawsuit go to trial.
Referring to Taylor’s 1972 conviction on 28 murder charges in the Tucson fire, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Márquez wrote: “A reasonable jury could find that the City of Tucson and Pima County reached an agreement to violate Taylor’s constitutional rights by suppressing” a lab report that found no evidence of arson accelerants in the fire debris, and by “procuring false testimony from jailhouse informants.”
“A reasonable jury could also find that the City of Tucson’s pattern and practice of racial discrimination and Pima County’s deliberate indifference to criminal defendants’ constitutional rights were the moving forces behind these constitutional violations,” the judge wrote in her Jan. 19 ruling.
A settlement conference in federal court is set for Feb. 20-21, court filings show.
The Pima County Board of Supervisors and the Tucson City Council discussed the case with legal counsel in closed-door executive sessions at their meetings this week.
The City Council’s agenda said it would “consider its position and instruct its attorneys” regarding the “pending litigation or settlement discussions.”
At the same time, Pima County and the city filed a motion to move the case from Tucson to Phoenix, which indicates it could still go to trial rather than be settled.
The city and county’s motion said the “decades-long publicity in this high-profile case has so saturated the Tucson Division’s jury pool with prejudicial and incorrect coverage that Defendants” (the local governments) “cannot get a fair trial here,” and that prospective jurors have “been trained for at least the last 10 years to believe that Louis Taylor is innocent and wrongfully convicted at the hands of the Defendants’ improper conduct.”
The case so far
Márquez’s 60-page court order put Taylor’s lawsuit back on the table after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that a 2013 deal allowing Taylor to go free after decades in prison also prevented him from winning financial compensation for damages.
The divided three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit had said it took “no pleasure in reaching this unfortunate result.” And in a sharp dissent, Judge Mary Schroeder said the court’s ruling “magnifies an already tragic injustice” against Taylor. “He was convicted on the basis of little more than (his) proximity and trial evidence that ‘black boys’ like to set fires,” Schroeder wrote.
Court records note that an all-white jury convicted Taylor, who is part African-American and part Hispanic. He was 16 when the fire in the downtown hotel killed 29 people.
In 2012, Taylor’s lawyers presented new evidence, including that the fire was not arson, which led to the Tucson Fire Department finding in a new investigation that no cause for the fire could be determined.
Pima County prosecutors said they continued to believe Taylor was guilty but offered him the chance to plead “no contest” to the original charges in return for having his earlier convictions vacated and being sentenced to time served.
Taylor, who always maintained he was innocent, agreed to the 2013 deal with then-Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall’s office and entered the plea. He was released that year after serving 42 years in prison.
Two years later, in 2015, Taylor sued Pima County and Tucson for violating his rights to due process and a fair trial. However, due to the no-contest plea, the 9th Circuit panel ruled he was prohibited from seeking damages for his prison time.
‘Undermines fairness’
Márquez disagrees in the new ruling, writing:
“A reasonable jury could find that, if a new trial had been ordered in Taylor’s case, the prosecution knew it would have been unable to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt … due to new evidence that the Pioneer Hotel fire cannot be classified as arson and due to serious problems concerning the admissibility and credibility of key evidence presented during Taylor’s 1972 trial.
“A reasonable jury could also find that the Pima County Attorney’s Office leveraged Taylor’s existing incarceration in order to extract a no-contest plea from him, despite Taylor’s protestations that he was innocent and had been wrongfully convicted, and despite evidence undermining the integrity of the 1972 convictions. If Taylor had rejected the no-contest plea agreement, he would have had to have spent months or even years waiting in prison while the trial court resolved his Petition for Post-Conviction Relief. The no-contest plea allowed him to instead obtain immediate release, and he has testified that he agreed to the plea solely because he did not want to spend any more time incarcerated.
“Even when not motivated by financial concerns, requiring a wrongfully convicted defendant to plead no contest to the original charges in order to obtain release from prison undermines the fairness and integrity of the justice system,” Márquez wrote.
Moreover, she said, a jury could reasonably find that subsequent actions under current Pima County Attorney Laura Conover indicate prosecutors were motivated by the county’s financial considerations in their handling of Taylor’s case.
Conover started notifying stakeholders in 2022 that a motion to exonerate Taylor would be filed, the judge said. But Conover later testified she changed her mind after meeting with her team about the legal standards for post-conviction relief.
A former prosecutor in LaWall’s office, David Berkman, had sent an email to a county supervisor warning that if exonerated at Conover’s request, Taylor could “get damages which may cost the County a ton,” the judge noted.
“There are material disputes of fact concerning why Conover decided not to file a motion to exonerate Taylor,” Márquez wrote. “A reasonable jury could conclude that her decision was based solely on her evaluation of the legal merits of the draft motion to exonerate. However, a reasonable jury could instead find that her decision was influenced by Pima County’s financial considerations.”
Moving the case
The lawyers for Pima County and Tucson subsequently wrote in their motion for a change of trial venue: “Through the local media, evidence that Taylor intends to use at trial has been discussed (unfairly and even incorrectly),” and key defense witnesses for the two local governments “have been vilified.”
They also said that Conover, “who is in the midst of her reelection campaign, is a key witness for Taylor.”
“Only a transfer will ensure a fair trial and an impartial jury,” they said.
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