Plea deals cause tension between Tucson police, Pima County attorney

Ongoing tensions between the Pima County Attorney’s Office and the Tucson Police Department were recently brought out into the open.

It started with the case of Daniel Hollander, who went into a Tucson school in January, armed and apparently in the midst of a psychotic episode. He was disarmed and arrested by a police officer working at the school, which was all cheered as a win for the rule of law.

But then, things went awry — at least in the eyes of the Tucson police officers who arrested him. Hollander was indicted by a grand jury of three serious felonies and a misdemeanor. But, he got a plea deal from the County Attorney’s Office: a year-and-a-half in prison and then 10 years of probation.

Tucson police say the sentence is not enough for someone who put himself in the position to commit a mass shooting in a Tucson school. But, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover argues it was the police officer who had mishandled the case, not reading the suspect his Miranda rights and necessitating the eventual plea deal.

There’s a lot of outrage about Hollander’s case in Tucson, but Tim Steller, a longtime columnist for The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, says he’s more concerned about what he sees as a pattern of the light treatment of repeat offenders.

Stellar joined The Show to talk more about the case.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: So I outlined the case of Daniel Hollander there, which is kind of bringing a lot of these tensions to light. But you say you have concerns about repeat offenders, particularly those who are charged with illegally possessing guns. Tell us about that.

TIM STELLER: Well, yeah. This is starting to come to light, a year or two ago, when Tucson police started going to the federal prosecutors to pursue prohibited possession cases against people that they thought had endangered the public through gunfire and illegally possessed firearms because they were felons who had guns. A lot of these were gang members or other people who ended up shooting, shooting people or shooting at least in the air, out in public.

And so what they had noticed — Tucson police — is that in the Pima County Attorney’s Office, a lot of cases were being pled down from prohibited possessor to solicitation of prohibited possession or attempt to possess a firearm illegally. These are probation-eligible charges. And so, theoretically, they don’t take people off the street, whereas taking these cases to the federal prosecutors was more easily getting prison sentences for them.

GILGER: Right. So they’re kind of going around the county attorney’s office now. What has the county attorney, Laura Conover, had to say about all this?

STELLER: Well, the prohibited possessor situation, she kind of defended herself earlier this year and noted that her office last year had prosecuted 572 prohibited possessor cases, while the feds had only prosecuted 60 local prohibited possessor cases.

But I was able to get a hold — they provided me with a spreadsheet of those 572 cases. And I was really surprised to find that 44% had been dismissed. So it really was, we were talking about 320, I think, was the number of cases that she had prosecuted. And then another 17% were pled down to probation eligible charges.

This was a previously existing tension that existed between the Tucson police and the Pima County Attorney’s Office. But that tension was kind of kept hidden until the Daniel Hollander case came up.

GILGER: Yeah. So you call it a revolving door? Basically that if, this is what the police are accusing of happening, they see these people all the time. If prosecutors allow folks to get these lower plea deals, they’re still on the street or they’re back on the street. Describe what that looks like, some of the cases that you outlined.

STELLER: Well, there was one man whose case I pulled out. I went through 20 of the cases that had been pled down, and one of the men had moved to Tucson in March 2020. He was promptly arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He had a traffic stop and had meth and a gun or a couple of guns.

So they pushed him through the system. And according to the pre-sentence report, he had two previous ... cases ... they were pled down to solicitation to possess a firearm. So in both cases, he was given probation. And then in the third case here in Pima County, he was again given solicitation to possess a firearm and got probation.

And within a year, he had already done the same crime again and was stopped in June this year with a gun and meth. And so this person, I don’t know if he has done any violence — not that I know of.

But there are other cases, for example, the case of a man who attacked a police officer who was trying to stop him for shoplifting outside a Circle K. That man was a previous violent offender and had been just kind of let go repeatedly.

GILGER: Let me ask you, Tim, lastly here in the last minute or so, about the politics here. Conover is a Democrat. Tucson’s a blue city, right? Is there a political undertone, you think, to these accusations by the police against her office?

STELLER: Oh, for sure. I think this is a longstanding tension often between police officers and police departments and prosecutors, because prosecutors are dealing with legal restraints that police often don’t either see or don’t believe are necessary.

So in this Hollander case, the police wanted her to take the case to the judge and see if the evidence would be thrown out rather than just deciding it would be on her own.

So typically police are more conservative politically than the general public. And so that’s the case here. And so it’s kind of not an unexpected tension, but it’s a little harsher than it has been. And it finally came out in the public.