The race to be Pima County’s top prosecutor will be settled in the July 30 Democratic primary election between incumbent Laura Conover and challenger Mike Jette.
The Pima County Attorney’s Office has an annual budget of about $40 million, decides whether or not to charge defendants with a crime and provides legal counsel for the Board of Supervisors, administration and all other county offices. It also investigates allegations of police misconduct, reviews police shootings and lobbies the state Legislature on issues that range from victims rights and crime bills to abortion access.
Laura Conover was first elected to the post in 2020, replacing Barbara LaWall, who decided not to seek reelection after leading the office from 1996 through 2020.
Her challenger is Mike Jette, 51, a career prosecutor with 16 years of experience at the Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Conover and Jette both say they want to prioritize prosecuting violent crime and protect the elderly and others vulnerable to scams. And they say they’re committed to avoiding sending people with substance abuse problems to jail, are loud proponents of abortion access, tackling the drug crisis, oppose the death penalty and favor diversion over prison for nonviolent crimes when mental health or drug issues are an underlying issue.
They differ, however, on the role of the county attorney, how to do the job and what defines effectiveness.
Conover: ‘We are on the right track’
Conover graduated from the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law in 2005. She became a criminal defense attorney who worked in superior and federal courts for more than a decade.
Conover then became a legal victims’ advocate and worked with employers to hire inmates released from prison, telling the Star in February 2020 that after graduation, she dedicated her career to “defending the poor, advocating for victims, and fighting for justice in local and federal courts.”
In 2016, she founded a private practice, Conover Law, and in 2018 she was appointed by federal judges to manage nearly 400 federal contract lawyers statewide.
She would go on to announce her run for the office in November 2019, with a “responsible reform” of the office as a top priority heading into the August 2020 primary, telling the Star Pima County “cannot keep using our jails to warehouse poor people,” and that it “cannot continue prosecuting people for being mentally ill while not prosecuting those who actually harm us.”
Conover garnered endorsements from Rep. Raúl Grijalva and other Democratic heavyweights and even from musician John Legend. She won about 60% of the vote in a three-way primary race.
Conover has stated multiple times this campaign that her biggest challenge when entering office in January 2021 was the nationwide crime spike and a “backlog” of 144 homicide cases dating back to 2017, which took her office about two years to clear.
She told the Star last week that the county is down 43% on homicides and 39% down on robberies compared to two years ago. She points to he office distributing more than 18,000 gun locks, becoming a certified Narcan distributor, helping to pass a county-wide prohibited possessor law and introducing diversion programs and alternatives to incarceration to steer those with mental health or addiction issues towards treatment.
But Conover’s first term also had its fair share of controversies. Questions of office morale and a high turnover rate surfaced just six months into her term, followed by failing to get a criminal indictment against a former Tucson police officer who shot and killed a man on a mobility scooter during a shoplifting incident.
Additionally, Conover’s office faced criticisms of moving too slowly in the 2021 shooting death of a University of Arizona professor. The killer, Murad Dervish, was eventually convicted and sentenced to a “natural life” term in prison.
Concerns of retail theft and the impact it has on businesses has been a core concern of residents in recent years. A sticking point for Conover detractors was the case of Jose Monreal, Jr., a Pima County corrections officer who was caught stealing items from a Walmart self-checkout 23 separate times. He was arrested in 2023 on 23 counts of theft, but Conover’s office declined to press charges.
In an interview with a local TV station, Conover said the charges fell well below the $1,000 minimum threshold for felony charges, when Monreal was caught stealing about $500 worth of product. The Attorney’s Office could have gone for felony prosecution under a pattern of behavior, but “it would be like prosecuting 23 separate cases,” Conover told the outlet in December 2023. Conover, last week, stood by the decision.
“It was of $480, so it was less than half of the threshold. We knew he would be held accountable, properly, for that misdemeanor in Sahuarita, for a guy with no criminal history,” Conover told the Star. “Looking at things holistically, this is a dad with a whole bunch of kids who was (stealing) packages of frozen food ... I stand by my team’s decision.”
Then there’s the civil case of Louis Taylor, who was convicted of murder in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire. As county attorney, Conover in 2022 said a motion to exonerate Taylor would be filed, but later testified she changed her mind after meeting with her team. Conover agreed to a diversion program with the State Bar in March to end an investigation spurred by a complaint from a former prosecutor. Conover has continuously denied allegations of misconduct in her actions related to the Taylor cases.
“With Louis Taylor, it became clear that the law was restricting me all the way down, to only anything new I could bring into court after 2013, and yeah, that was hard,” she told the Star. “It was hard to accept that legal conclusion, but it’s correct, I believe. I’ve never been challenged on the actual legal conclusion, but of course it deeply saddened, understandably, a lot of the community... (But the job), it is a willingness to make unpopular decision, because unless the standard is to do the right thing, you’re not in the right.”
Conover’s campaign raised over $30,000 in the first three months of 2024, bringing her total fundraising amount to more than $107,000. Conover began the year with over $26,631 on hand and spent over $23,000 in the first quarter. The candidate garnered endorsements from Rep. Grijalva, former Rep. Ron Barber, Attorney General Kris Mayes, District 5 Supervisor and Board Chair Adelita Grijalva, and organizations such as Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona and Arizona List.
If re-elected, Conover says she is committed to fighting for reproductive rights, continuing her environmental unit’s fight to protect groundwater, pushing preventative measures against violent crime and confronting the fentanyl crisis.
Conover says the fact that she and Jette’s campaign share many similar priorities for the office is a good sign.
“Quite frankly it’s a tremendous accomplishment, it’s an acknowledgement and a realization that we are on the right track, that I am on the right track, that the community that voted me in pretty overwhelmingly had chosen our platform and that we’ve been producing,” Conover said last week. “We’re delivering on reform. All markers of violent crime are down, we’re getting results (and) we’re making progress.”
Conover plans to continue the work her offices established in jurisdictional collaboration, such as her “Metro Seven” team, which includes regular meetings with the county administrator, board chair, mayor, police chief and city manager.
She says a collaborative approach to tackling major community problems is critical and works. She cited recent data showing a slight drop in homelessness and overdose deaths here. “I really do think these metro solutions we’re putting into place are starting to pay off.”
Pima County saw overdose deaths rise from 2020 into 2021, Conover’s first year in office, from 445 to 497, respectively. In 2022, overdose deaths remained relatively the same, 495, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office’s data dashboard.
The largest tally in overdose deaths came in 2023, 532 overall, the office’s data shows. Of those, 309 were due to fentanyl, according to county data. As of July 5, 200 total overdose deaths have occurred so far this year. Of those, 101 have been due to fentanyl.
Conover says the drop she sees in overdose deaths can be attributed to implementations like the Supportive Treatment and Engagement Programs with Services (STEPs) Court, which came by way of a partnership between the County Attorney’s Office and the Superior Court which started in 2021. She also said that continuing county programs and resources like these are the way further implement ‘responsible reform.’
“It’s our partnerships, like with the city’s Department of Health and Wellness, with County Public Health, because when you understand that health and safety is all one thing, your whole universe has expanded,” she said. “We used to spend a third of our prosecutorial budget on before I came on simple drug possession and paraphernalia, that was a third of our caseload. Just think of how we’ve reworked that into prosecutors actually doing the job they went to school to do.”
Jette: Actions matter more than words
After attending the University of Oregon on a scholarship for football, Jette said, he earned his law degree from Lewis & Clark College in 2001 before moving to Tucson in 2002. He later earned degrees from the Thunderbird School of Management in 2004 and a master’s degree in international security from the UA in 2021.
Jette has stated multiple times that his nearly two decades in various prosecutorial roles at the county, state, federal and international levels makes him the right candidate to take over the office.
Jette resigned as a federal prosecutor to run for county attorney.
His prosecutorial experience has shown in many high-profile cases, including the indictment of 21 members of a Tucson Air Guard unit indicted on fraud charges while working as an assistant Attorney General for Arizona, indicting 18 people in a nearly-$10 million copper theft ring, which Jette says was the “largest copper heist case in U.S. history.” He also handled cases such as the Tucson Museum of Art theft, the defrauding of the Marana Stockyards and Livestock Market, as well as the case of the 2009 Super Bowl hack, which caused thousands of Comcast subscribers to see 37 seconds of an X-rated movie during a replay.
He returned to Tucson last year after an being in an over-two year U.S. Department of Justice program, training prosecutors in Pakistan, the Philippines and Bangladesh. His duties were to set up offices, hiring prosecutors and training them on cases such as terrorism, terrorism finance, trafficking persons, gender-based violence, cases involving U.S. citizens as well as money laundering, he said.
Since launching his campaign, Jette − and his supporters − have criticized Conover for her lack of prosecutorial experience, perceived conflicts in certain high-profile cases and the fact that the former criminal defense attorney is running the county’s top prosecutorial office.
After returning stateside, the Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office added Jette as co-counsel in the high-profile border shooting case against George Alan Kelly case, who was arrested in the January 2023 shooting death of a migrant near Nogales.
In April, the jury split 7-1 in favor of acquitting Kelly, and a mistrial was declared. Jette, in an interview with the Star, acknowledged that it was a failure on the verdict, but that has “nothing to do with the prosecution,” or the officers “who spent months and months in trial prep” for the case.
“There’s a wrong, somebody killed somebody without cause. They should be held accountable. And then we have a jury system that decided a different way,” he said. “We know what the situation is, we live in Arizona. We live in a border community. We live in a place where people get ratcheted up on nonsense, you know, hysterical comments about crime and violence at the border, and it’s just not true.
Launching his campaign last year, Jette raised over $85,000 in the first three months and has garnered endorsements from state lawmakers Seth Blattman, Alma Hernandez and Consuelo Hernandez, as well as former Board chair Sharon Bronson, Conover’s predecessor Barbara LaWall, and local organizations such as the Tucson Crime Free Coalition and the Pima County Deputy’s Organization, a union.
Jette told the Star the first of many priorities for the office are to implement a policy to send nonviolent — especially first-time offenders − through diversion programs “automatically.” He also would try to get many of the experienced staffers who left the office soon after Conover took control to return.
“For non-dangerous, nonviolent, nonrepetitive offenders, (diversion) should be automatic. Don’t even get me involved, because when you get me involved or law enforcement, you’ve got things bringing implicit bias (in),” he said. “If I can could take 10 of those (defendants) and take two or three out (to diversion) immediately, I just made Pima County a whole lot safer. The only way I could do that, though, is to get them in a diversion program.”
According to the stated issues on his campaign website, Jette’s other priorities would be an “aggressive and multi-faceted approach to combat” the fentanyl crisis in Pima County, intensify the prosecution of retail theft and focusing on retail theft rings, enforcing the Victims’ Bill of Rights and addressing “quality of life crimes,” such as burglaries and other property crimes.
He also said the fraud unit can do more to recover losses here. “The last case I did before leaving Pakistan, one case, $3.5 million. So this $1 million (recovered from the office’s financial crimes unit in its first year) is cute, but there’s billions of dollars of fraud going on, and nothing’s being done,” he told the Star.
He said LaWall transferred most while collar crimes, like fraud, the the state Attorney General’s Office, allowing her office to focus more on violent crimes. “That’s what we call good management,” Jette said.
Jette said Conover is saying more than she is doing when it comes to utilizing diversion in cases where it appropriate.
“The last year of LaWall (2020), there were 1,500 people in the diversion program. Today, less than 400. You can say what you’re going to do, but the only thing you’re doing is just not doing anything,” Jette said, “and then you can easily just sell that to the public, ‘this is what we’re doing, we’re not prosecuting these cases.’”
According to data from the Pima County Attorney’s Office, there were 415 “successful” diversions and 137 “unsuccessful” diversions in 2020, LaWall’s year in-office.
In 2021 − Conover’s first year in office − STEPs Court, a diversion program, began operating
That year, STEPs was offered to defendants 331 times, with 63 “completed” and 129 “failed,” data shows. Additionally, there were 247 “successful” and 32 “unsuccessful” diversions cases from additional programs in the office.
Last year, according to the office, STEPs was offered 1,518 times, resulting in 150 cases that were “completed” and 127 that were “unsuccessful.” An additional 387 diversion cases were “successful” and 55 were “unsuccessful,” data shows.
Politics vs. priorities
Criticism against Jette by Conover and her supporters begins with his frequent changes in his political affiliation.
Jette first registered here in 2002 as a Democrat. He changed to “Party Not Designated” in 2005. He registered as a Republican in 2011. He switched back unaffiliated in 2012. He registered as independent in 2015 then unaffiliated in 2019. And Jette registered as a Democrat in 2023, according to the Pima County Recorder’s Office.
Jette told the Star last week that the initial change to an Independent affiliation was based on a suggestion from his former boss, Terry Goddard, when Jette was with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
“I was doing Rio Nuevo, I was prosecuting and investigating judges and cops, and legislators,” Jette told the Star, reiterating the advice received by Goddard, that “it looks better for the office if you have an independent prosecutor” handling these cases.
Jette acknowledged that the County Attorney’s Office, ideally, should be a nonpartisan one, but the “reality of the situation” is that Independents don’t win offices.
The flip to become a Republican, Jette told the Star, was a strategic one, following an incident in 2011 when his home was burglarized. After his case got declined from LaWall’s office that year, Jette said that he considered challenging her as a Republican candidate. He then flipped his political affiliation, and filed an exploratory committee with the county for a potential challenge against LaWall in 2012.
“Everyone and their mom told me that you could not, you cannot primary LaWall. LaWall was the institution, LaWall was popular,” Jette said. “What makes it funny (is that) Kris Mayes was a Republican for 31 years, and she was an officeholder as a Republican (on the) Arizona Corporation Commission for two terms. Switched to run to Democrat to run for AG. Gabby Giffords was a Republican, Mark Kelly was a Republican, Steve (Kozachik) was a Republican...
“I was Republican for literally a blip in my life, now I’m considered a Republican,” Jette said. “This purity test is 100% ridiculous, because what we want to do now is focus on Mike Jette as a Republican, which I’m not, instead of focusing on 17 years and who’s more competent to run the office.”
“It is absolutely fair to point out that this doesn’t look and feel like a Democratic primary,” Conover told the Star. “And I think it’s fair to point out that we have someone who changed parties in order to file a run in a primary, and his first quarter finance report does not look at all like a Democratic finance report. It looks like a Republican candidate funded by all of the obvious Republican donors and investors that invest in Republicans, county-and-statewide.”
Some of these “obvious Republican donors” that jumped out to Conover, she said, were David Mehl, a Tucson Republican on the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, and president and owner of Cottonwood Properties, who donated $2,500 to Jette’s campaign; Conover also pointed to the many board members of HSL Properties, including Humberto Lopez himself, which she says “bundled up somewhere between $20-25,000” for Jette.
“It’s all the big, corporate developers, again, in an office that has an environmental law unit on the civil side,” Conover said. “We have a candidate who is raising a fortune in that kind of money, in a race that’s really important to protect our precious Sonoran Desert.”
Jette says Conover supporters are trying to make a villain of LaWall. He said he supports her starting the Children Advocacy Center and the changes she pushed for in state’s victim bill of rights.
What separates him from Conover, Jette says is less about politics and policies and more about leadership and doing more to meet stated goals.
“I live here, I’ve got the experience now, not just at the state, but federal and international, global experience as well . . . If the office was ran more confidently, then I probably wouldn’t even be considering it right now,” Jette said. “However... Attorneys are leaving, the culture is bad, plea deals are going up, victims aren’t getting voices, domestic violence aren’t getting prosecuted (and) gun cases aren’t getting prosecuted.”
