County's top prosecutor pushed to explain reversal in deadly Tucson hotel fire

Pima County Attorney Laura Conover had drafted a motion asking to vacate charges against the man convicted in the deadly 1970 Pioneer Hotel Fire months before announcing the charges against him would not be dropped, court records show.

Last month, Louis Taylor’s attorneys, Stanley Feldman, John Leader, Peter Limperis and Timothy Stackhouse, filed a motion in Pima County Superior Court asking that the decision be reconsidered. It included records of various drafts of motions from the county attorney’s office regarding vacating Taylor’s convictions. The filing of the motion came after a federal court judge ordered that the records be given to Taylor’s attorneys.

Feldman said it was a “prolonged fight” to get these records as well as the depositions of Conover and Gabriel “Jack” Chin, the former head of the PCAO’s conviction and sentencing integrity unit. Conover has since testified in a deposition, and Feldman said they are waiting for the transcript, hoping to get to the bottom of why she changed her mind.

Taylor served 42 years in prison after he was convicted of starting the downtown Tucson fire that killed 29 people in 1970. In 2013, Taylor made a deal with former Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall’s office and pleaded “no contest” to the charges. That set aside his conviction and released him from prison.

Two years later, Taylor sued Pima County and the city for violating his right to due process and a fair trial, maintaining his innocence. However, due to the no-contest plea, Taylor was prohibited from seeking damages for his time in prison.

In a drafted motion dated May 30, 2022, Conover moved to vacate Taylor’s convictions and dismiss the indictment with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled.

“After careful evaluation, this office has concluded that the judgement in this unique case must be vacated and the case dismissed because the conviction was based on an erroneous application of the law,” the draft motion said.

The draft motion also states that the prosecutor’s office insisting on a no-contest plea was improper for two reasons: newly discovered evidence and misconduct.

It was later discovered that the state’s key witness and arson expert, Cyrillis Holmes, had theories of arson that were not only wrong for a number of methodological reasons, but were also based on race, the draft motion said.

The draft motion also states the prosecutor on the case, Horton Weiss, had a long record of litigation misconduct and committed serious acts of misconduct during this particular case, including improper contact with the judge and jury.

“Under the circumstances, this case should have been dismissed in 2013. The state now moves this court to achieve justice and uphold the integrity of conviction in Arizona by ordering that result,” the draft motion said.

Three months after that draft, Conover announced that she would not drop the criminal charges against Taylor after her office “did not find any new evidence of innocence,” the Star reported at the time.

If Taylor were to have been exonerated, it would potentially have allowed him to seek compensation for a wrongful conviction.

The motion filed by Taylor’s attorneys also included drafts from a PCAO’s conviction and sentencing integrity unit report that recommended Taylor’s convictions on 28 counts of murder be set aside.

That drafted report, dated Jan. 11, 2022, said a review of the case showed misconduct and procedural defects. It stated no reasonable fact-finder could now conclude that Taylor is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

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It went on to say that Holmes’ racial theories and the changes in fire science were clearly new evidence that warranted setting aside Taylor’s conviction.

“This office insisted on a no-contest plea in 2013 because it concluded that there were questions about whether the flaws in Holmes expert testimony were newly discovered. This conclusion is not supportable even apart from the basic errors in Holmes’ arson analysis, at least his crackpot racial theories were newly discovered. If the trial judge would have been made aware of the basis for Holmes’ race-based theory, his testimony would have likely been precluded, thus affecting the outcome of the trial,” the draft said.

A memo from Chin to Sam Brown, the county’s chief civil deputy attorney, said the office recommended supporting Taylor’s post-conviction relief efforts since the evidence that led to his conviction is “inconclusive” and “tainted by racism,” records say.

When asked about the drafts, Conover said that after an exhaustive investigation, the conviction and sentencing integrity unit was persuasive and the initial recommendation was to move to vacate the criminal conviction from 2013. Since, at that time, it looked likely that her office would take action, she began calling stakeholders to give them warning.

During Memorial Day weekend in 2022, a three-hour summit with the conviction and sentencing integrity unit and their appeals chief was held. By the end of the gathering, Conover said, it was agreed that her office could not move forward.

“We all agreed at the end of that weekend we didn’t have anything that we could put on for evidence that would have been new since 2013,” Conover said. “As surprising as that outcome was even for us, it became clear that we could not credibly go forward and to try to vacate the sentence.”

Conover said it took “several more weeks of analysis” due to the reversal of thinking, but by the end of June 2022 they began drafting the news release that announced they weren’t taking action.

“It was unpopular, but the job is to do the right thing and these kinds of decisions are difficult decisions,” Conover said.

Conover’s involvement in the Pioneer Fire case has been a touchy subject for years, with critics citing conflict of interest issues.

Before LaWall retired, her office hired an outside attorney to represent the county in Taylor’s civil lawsuit, saying it did so because Conover had conducted research for one of Taylor’s parole hearings when she was in law school. They also said Conover discussed her dismay with how the case was handled throughout her 2020 election campaign, the Star reported.

Conover has said the conclusions made by LaWall’s team were wrong, and she “never represented or participated in the representation of Taylor, whether in law school 20 years ago or since.”

Most recently, an affidavit from Nina Trasoff, a former TV news anchor and past City Council member, said she volunteered to edit news releases for Conover’s office. Trasoff said she helped edit a news release about Taylor’s exoneration that was scheduled to be issued on May 28, 2022, court records say.

However, that news release was never issued to the public and months later, it was announced that Taylor’s charges would not be dropped. Trasoff said Conover told her she decided not to go with the original news release, “because Phoenix lawyers had threatened bar discipline and possible disbarment if she went forward with the plan to exonerate Taylor,” court records say.

In response to these claims, Conover has said she’s proven that the decisions she makes are her own and based on facts and the law.