County Attorney Conover opts out of any future Louis Taylor prosecution

Pima County Attorney Laura Conover is asking that another office be ready to investigate the Louis Taylor criminal case should anything new be learned in the litigation of his civil lawsuit.

This comes shortly after Taylor’s attorneys interviewed Conover and subpoenaed her to testify at the upcoming civil trial of Taylor’s discrimination lawsuit. He seeks compensation from Pima County and the city of Tucson for his long former incarceration in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel Fire, in which 29 people died.

Conover “is a key witness for Taylor,” city and county attorneys have said in court filings. After saying during her 2020 campaign for county attorney that the justice system made a mistake in not exonerating Taylor, Conover initiated a process after she took office to exonerate him but later withdrew it.

“In 2021, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover’s office conducted a thorough, independent, and objective assessment of the Louis Taylor matter based on the facts and information known at that time,” a spokeswoman for Conover’s office, Shawndrea Thomas, said in a written statement Tuesday to the Arizona Daily Star.

“She followed the limitations of Arizona law in reaching her conclusion. County Attorney Conover has recently been deposed in the civil case and has now been subpoenaed to testify at the civil trial later this year. Based on these new, changed circumstances, the Pima County Attorney’s Office is seeking to have an outside agency investigate any facts or information that may arise out of the civil litigation,” the statement said.

According to Stanley Feldman, one of the attorneys representing Taylor, Conover’s request for removal has to do with a new post-conviction proceeding filed in county Superior Court by the Arizona Justice Project, which seeks to have Taylor’s criminal charges from the fire exonerated.

“The whole thing is confusing. In the new post-conviction proceeding filed by the Justice Project, the county’s chief prosecutor does not want to decide whether or not Taylor should be completely exonerated,” said Feldman, a former Arizona Supreme Court chief justice. “And in the civil case in federal court, the county’s lawyers have now filed an action in the 9th Circuit, a petition for a writ, seeking to prevent the trial judge in federal court from deciding the same issue.”

“The county on all fronts seems to not want to handle the issue of innocence,” Feldman told the Star Tuesday.

Conover’s office did not return messages Tuesday seeking comment beyond the written statement.

Two days of settlement talks between the city, county and Taylor’s attorneys were scheduled for last week, but only one day was completed because Pima County and Tucson filed a request with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to throw Taylor’s civil suit out.

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Taylor served 42 years in prison after being convicted of starting the fire in the downtown Tucson hotel and of 28 counts of murder. In 2013, he made a “no-contest” plea deal with then-County Attorney Barbara LaWall’s office that set aside the conviction and released him from prison.

In 2015, Taylor sued Pima County and Tucson for violating his right to due process and a fair trial, alleging racism and civil conspiracy led to his arrest and conviction. The amount of compensation he is seeking is undisclosed.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019, however, that Taylor could not collect damages for his time in prison because of the no-contest plea he made. Taylor’s lawyers said new evidence, and evidence left out of the time of Taylor’s criminal case, permitted a new hearing.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Márquez ordered Taylor’s discrimination lawsuit to trial, which led to the settlement talks that have now been paused. A jury trial is set to begin April 22.

Unless the 9th Circuit stops the case, the city and county’s attorneys wrote to the appellate court, Tucson and Pima County “will be forced to defend 28 convictions — dating back to 1972 — and exposed to incarceration-based damages in a civil trial that should not be happening.”

The local governments are challenging Márquez’s Jan. 19 ruling in which the judge 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.”

Conover, a former defense attorney before successfully running to be the county’s top prosecutor, had said during her political campaign in 2020 that the handling of Taylor’s case had been an inspiration for her decision to work in law and politics. She said then that she did a little research for one of his parole hearings when she was a law student in 2005.

As county attorney, Conover started notifying stakeholders in 2022 that a motion to exonerate Taylor would be filed, Márquez wrote in her ruling. But Conover later testified she changed her mind after meeting with her team about the legal standards for post-conviction relief.

The judge noted that 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.”

“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.”