Joe Exotic, the eccentric star of Netflix’s “Tiger King” true crime documentary series, faces an uphill battle as he tries to lessen his two-decade prison sentence in a murder-for-hire plot to kill animal welfare activist Carole Baskin.
A three-judge panel on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver on Thursday pressed the former Oklahoma zookeeper’s lawyer during oral arguments, seeming disinclined to change a district judge’s 21-year sentence handed down in January.
An attorney for Exotic — whose legal name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage — contended that the court should rule his sentence unconstitutional on the grounds that he is being punished twice for the same offense. His two 8 1/2-year sentences for the murder-for-hire convictions, lawyer Molly Parmer argued, should run concurrently — not consecutively — since the crime involved a single, overarching plot.
“This is one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice I’ve ever seen,” Parmer told The Denver Post outside the courthouse.
The government argued that a federal judge in Oklahoma resentenced Maldonado-Passage correctly in January when he imposed a 21-year federal prison term. Maldonado-Passage, who maintains his innocence, also was convicted of killing five tigers, selling tiger cubs and falsifying wildlife records during a 2019 trial.
A federal judge in Oklahoma in January 2020 originally sentenced Maldonado-Passage to 22 years following the high-profile trial. But the 10th Circuit in 2021 ruled that the judge erred by not grouping the two murder-for-hire convictions at sentencing, leading to the new sentence.
The three-judge panel, however, upheld his conviction.
Now Maldonado-Passage’s team says he’s being punished twice for the same plot — a violation of the so-called “double jeopardy” clause laid out in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S Constitution. A jury found him guilty of two murder-for-hire counts since he was accused of hiring two different people to kill Baskin.
The justices during Thursday’s oral arguments pushed back on Parmer’s points several times, saying the legal team neglected to address certain grounds from the district court’s ruling.
“I mean, don’t you lose?” Judge Carolyn McHugh asked.
“No, we do not lose,” Parmer responded.
Senior Judge Bobby Baldock noted that the district court, in grouping the convictions in January’s resentencing, did exactly what the 10th Circuit had ordered it to do.
“Anything beyond that is what?” he asked Parmer. “It’s a violation of the mandate of the court.”
Christopher Jackson, an appellate partner at Denver’s Holland and Hart law firm who listened to Thursday’s arguments, said he appeared “fairly convinced” that the court would affirm the Tiger King’s sentence.
“The arguments they were making were beyond what the district court could do,” he said.
Maldanado-Passage did not attend Thursday’s proceedings. He remains in a medical facility in North Carolina for federal inmates after undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.
The cancer is now in remission, his attorney, John Phillips, told The Post. But the therapies wreaked havoc on his immune system, and he still throws up daily.
“He’s not doing well,” Phillips said.
The former zookeeper, in a Tweet Thursday morning, implored President Joe Biden to listen in and “learn something about his justice system.”
Maldanado-Passage has requested from Biden — and President Donald Trump before him — a presidential pardon.
During his trial, prosecutors said he hired a hitman for $3,000 to travel from Oklahoma to Florida to murder Baskin, his chief critic, who runs a nonprofit animal sanctuary near Tampa. Maldanado-Passage later met with an undercover FBI agent, authorities alleged, in which he discussed details of the planned murder.
On top of his efforts in the 10th Circuit, Maldanado-Passage is seeking a new trial in federal court in Oklahoma City on grounds that his team has newly discovered evidence and proof of government misconduct. Prosecutors are rejecting those claims.
