US Supreme Court to decide fate of two Arizona men imprisoned as teens
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The futures of two Arizona men sentenced to lifetimes in prison as teenagers will depend on the U.S. Supreme Court.
One man, who has already been freed from prison, is seeking money for what he claimed was a wrongful conviction and 42 years in prison. A Supreme Court ruling could impact thousands of wrongful conviction claims across the country.
The other man is seeking an opportunity for release.
Louis Taylor went to prison in the 1970s after he was arrested at age 16 and convicted of setting a Tucson hotel fire that killed 29 people. In 2013, experts using new technology determined that the fire may not have even been arson. Pima County offered Taylor a plea deal, and he was freed after 42 years.
His lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to allow him to sue Pima County for monetary damages for what he claims was a wrongful conviction.
Riley Briones Jr. went to prison in 1995 at age 17 after being involved in a fatal robbery on the Salt River Reservation. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated his sentence and sent his case back to district court because the district judge who resentenced him in 2016 did not consider whether Briones was “irredeemable.”
The U.S. Department of Justice is asking the Supreme Court to keep Briones’ life sentence intact.
Louis Taylor
After midnight on Dec. 20, 1970, a fire occurred at the Pioneer Hotel in Tucson.
Taylor, who was 16 at the time, was arrested after a hotel employee told police he heard “two Negro boys with bushy hair were fighting,” according to court records.
Police questioned Taylor for hours and he was not allowed to make a phone call. An all-white jury found him guilty of 28 counts of second-degree murder. He wasn’t charged for the 29th death, a woman who died of smoke inhalation several months after the fire.
The Arizona Justice Project worked for more than a decade to free Taylor.
The project hired fire experts from across the country to review the Fire Department’s findings. They concluded the fire was caused by the effects of flashover and had one point of origin, unlike what original investigators said.
The Arizona Justice Project filed a petition for post-conviction relief in 2012, asking that Taylor be released or his sentence reduced. His petition claimed newly discovered evidence could demonstrate his conviction was obtained in violation of his constitutional rights and that “no reasonable fact-finder would have found him guilty of the underlying offense beyond a reasonable doubt.”
However, before the court could respond to the project’s filing, Pima County offered a plea agreement.
Taylor pleaded no contest, meaning he did not admit to being guilty but a criminal record remains. He was freed at the age of 59.
For Taylor, the plea deal offered a faster and more assured route to freedom, as opposed to going through years of new court proceedings or hoping a governor would grant him clemency. But it didn’t fully clear his name, and so he has been unable to apply for the monetary damages often awarded to those who are wrongfully convicted.
According to the petition, appeals courts across the country are split with their opinions on whether these types of pleas protect governments from having to pay.
“In recent years, local governments have increasingly turned to this coercive tactic as a means of foreclosing recovery even by the demonstrably innocent,” his lawyers argued in the petition.
The Ninth Circuit appeals court ruled in January that Taylor could not receive damages.
In her dissent of the ruling, Judge Mary M. Schroeder said the decision magnified a “tragic injustice.”
“At the time of Tucson’s Pioneer Hotel fire in 1972, Louis Taylor was an African American male of sixteen. Arrested near the hotel, he was convicted on the basis of little more than that proximity and trial evidence that ‘black boys’ like to set fires,” the judge stated in her dissent.
Taylor’s lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the matter.
“After 42 years of wrongful imprisonment, Louis Taylor will — if the Ninth Circuit’s decision is permitted to stand — recover nothing for a lifetime stolen by his government,” his lawyers stated in the petition to the Supreme Court.
Taylor has struggled since his release.
He was not placed on parole or put in a transition program. His mother was dead, leaving him mostly on his own to learn how to become an adult in society at a later age than most people.
Taylor worked jobs landscaping and at a local movie theater. At one point, he was homeless.
In 2017, he was arrested for attempting to rob Tucson’s Riverpark Inn with a baseball bat. He is at the Lewis facility in Buckeye and is expected to be released in 2020.
“By all accounts, and as even the government conceded, Briones had been a model inmate.” Judge Morgan Christen
Riley Briones Jr.
Briones grew up on the Salt River Reservation. According to court records, his father abused him during his childhood. By the time he was 11, he was introduced to drugs and alcohol.
He later became a member of a gang he founded with his father and older brother.
According to court records, it was his brother’s idea to rob a Subway restaurant in May 1994 when Briones was 17.
Briones was the driver during the fatal robbery. Briones was charged with first-degree murder and other gang-related offenses, including arson, assault and witness tampering.
He and five co-defendants, including his father and brother, all were offered plea deals of 20 years, according to court records.
“Briones’ father was ‘adamant’ that neither he nor either of his sons should accept the deal,” Judge Morgan Christen wrote in a filing with the Ninth Circuit.
Briones did not take the deal and was convicted.
In 2016, he was resentenced in connection with two Supreme Court rulings that dealt with juvenile offenders.
According to court records, he improved himself in prison by holding a job in food service, volunteering as a speaker for younger inmates, earning his GED, and marrying the mother of his child.
“By all accounts, and as even the government conceded, Briones had been a model inmate,” Christen wrote.
However, the district judge decided to reimpose Briones’ life sentence.
His attorneys appealed to the Ninth Circuit because they argued the judge did not consider whether he was “irredeemable.”
The appeals court judges reviewed the district court’s findings and noted the lower court’s sentencing remarks were brief when deciding to reimpose Briones’ life sentence. There were only two pages of transcript, according to court records.
“We cannot tell whether the district court appropriately considered the relevant evidence of Briones’ youth or the evidence of his post-incarceration efforts at rehabilitation,” Christen wrote in the ruling.
The appeals court then vacated the sentence and sent the case back to district court.
The U.S. Department of Justice disagrees with Ninth Circuit’s view of case law and how to sentence juveniles and asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.