Louis Cuen Taylor, Arizona State Prison Inmate No. 31176 v. Harold Cardwell, and the Attorney General of the State of Arizona

Taylor was convicted in state court of twenty-eight counts of murder resulting from an arson-caused hotel fire in Tucson, Arizona, in December 1970. After the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his conviction, State v. Taylor, 112 Ariz. 68 , 537 P.2d 938 (1975), he filed this petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

The district court denied the petition without an evidentiary hearing. We vacate that judgment and remand for an eviden-tiary hearing on the voluntariness of certain statements Taylor made during an early morning stationhouse interrogation.

Taylor was present in the hotel when the fire was discovered, soon after midnight. He stayed, helping in the rescue efforts, until it was extinguished. Hotel employees had found Taylor standing near the source of the flames, and he told them that he had seen two boys fighting and that they started the fire.

After the fire was out, an employee told the police about Taylor’s statement. The officers took Taylor to the police station for questioning. After a while, inconsistencies in Taylor’s story caused the police to believe he might have set the fire. Around 3:05 a. m. the officers read him his Miranda rights. He agreed to continue…