A federal judge has canceled for now the civil trial in which the man convicted in a deadly hotel fire, then freed, seeks money from Tucson and Pima County for wrongful imprisonment and prosecutorial misconduct.
The trial date, which had been set for July 8, has been vacated pending a decision on Louis Taylor’s separate legal challenge to his conviction in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire that killed 29 people.
Vacating the civil trial date is appropriate “given that the resolution of (Taylor’s) pending state post-conviction proceedings will impact the scope of this litigation,” U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Márquez said in a June 10 ruling.
“A central issue in this litigation has been whether, due to his outstanding 2013 convictions, (Taylor) is barred … from obtaining incarceration damages,” Márquez wrote. “Taylor is currently challenging his 2013 convictions in state post-conviction proceedings. If the resolution of his state petition for post-conviction relief results in the vacatur of his 2013 convictions, there will be no” bar to his seeking financial compensation for damages.
Taylor’s post-conviction challenge is within the scope of what is known as “The Heck Bar,” a legal precedent set in 1994 by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case known as Heck v. Humphrey. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that people who are convicted of a crime are barred from filing a civil lawsuit against officials “if their claim would necessarily imply that their conviction is invalid,” according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties law firm that litigates cases nationwide.
“What that means,” the nonprofit says, is that if someone claims wrongful conviction, such as Taylor, then “their convictions must be formally overturned before they can file a lawsuit for money damages.”
Attorneys for Pima County and Taylor declined to comment this week.
Currently, the Arizona Justice Project is seeking to have Taylor’s criminal charges from the fire exonerated, through a post-conviction proceeding in Pima County Superior Court, the Star previously reported.
Taylor was convicted in 1972 of the murders of 28 people in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire in downtown Tucson. Taylor was 16 years old at the time of the fire and was sentenced to life in prison. He has maintained his innocence.
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.
County prosecutors maintained their contention that Taylor was guilty, but soon after 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 agreed to the 2013 deal with then-Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall’s office. He was released later that year after spending 42 years in prison.
Two years later, Taylor sued the county and the city saying his rights to due process and a fair trial were violated. However, a three-judge panel for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court ruled in 2019 that due to the no-contest plea Taylor was prohibited from seeking damages for the years he spent in prison.
Earlier this year, however, Márquez ordered that his lawsuit go to trial, writing in a Jan. 19 ruling that: “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.”
Soon after, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover opted out of any future Louis Taylor prosecution, her office announced in late February, should anything new be learned about the criminal case through litigation of his civil suit.
Then, in April, the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit said that while they were unsure if a federal court could expunge a state trial conviction, the matter was better suited to be handled as an appeal after trial, not before one. The circuit court also said that expunging the 2013 deal would mean Taylor’s incarceration would be back on the table and potentially eliminate his ability to seek damages.
In a 2021 order denying the county’s motion for summary judgment, Márquez wrote that she would consider expunging the conviction. The county has argued to the appellate court that expunging would be unconstitutional.
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