Tiger King’s ‘Joe Exotic’ Loses Bid to Shorten Prison Sentence

Joseph Maldonado-Passage—better known as “Joe Exotic” after featuring in the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King"—lost his bid Friday to shave roughly 8.5 years off his 21-year prison sentence for trying to have a rival killed.

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled against Maldonado-Passage, who previously won a one-year reduction when the appeals court found that the trial judge should have grouped his murder-for-hire plots together to determine his offense level under sentencing guidelines.

Maldonado-Passage, a controversial zookeeper who owned a large population of big cats, was convicted of wildlife crimes and twice hiring hitmen to kill animal rights activist Carole Baskin, whose rivalry with him was the central theme of the Netflix show.

Judge Michael R. Murphy, writing for the Tenth Circuit, said the lower court judge acted properly when he took the narrowest possible view of the court’s directive to resentence Maldonado-Passage, whose punishment includes consecutive 102-month terms for the murder plots.

For one thing, “we already affirmed Maldonado-Passage’s convictions,” Murphy wrote. “The relief he proposes, therefore, falls outside the breadth of this court’s prior mandate to address resentencing.”

The court also rejected the argument that separate sentences for the two attempts violated the constitutional ban on double jeopardy or the related rule against “multiplicity,” meaning different criminal counts reflecting the same act.

The idea that “a single victim unites the actions as one offense” does make sense in certain contexts, such as if a person sought to engage multiple killers but reached a deal only after several failed negotiations, Murphy acknowledged.

But that principle would lead to unfair or absurd results under other circumstances, the court found, saying it would let someone “amass a cavalry of independently operating killers to terrorize the intended victim without fear of being charged with multiple counts.”

In Maldonado-Passage’s case, “the two hitmen represented two independently operating plots to kill Baskin,” Murphy wrote.

Judges Bobby R. Baldock and Carolyn B. McHugh joined the ruling.

The government is represented by the US attorney’s office in Oklahoma City. Maldonado-Passage is represented by Molly Hiland Parmer of Atlanta.

The case is United States v. Maldonado-Passage, 10th Cir., No. 22-6025, 12/23/22.