The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review the criminal case of Joseph Maldonado-Passage, the eccentric exotic cat breeder better known as Joe Exotic, leaving his murder-for-hire conviction intact and all but closing the door on his years-long effort to escape a 21-year prison sentence.
As is typical when it turns away a case, the high court offered no explanation. But the effect is plain: Maldonado-Passage, 63, will remain behind bars at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, where inmates receive care for serious medical conditions. He has said publicly that he is battling prostate cancer.
The denial marks the final stop on a legal road that began in an Oklahoma courtroom in April 2019, wound through a federal appeals court, drew a brief burst of celebrity from a Netflix documentary, and ended with a one-line refusal from the nation's highest court. For anyone who believes the justice system should hold people accountable for plotting to have another human being killed, the outcome reported by The Daily Record is the right one.
In April 2019, an Oklahoma jury found Maldonado-Passage guilty on two counts of hiring people to murder Carole Baskin, a Florida-based animal rights activist with whom he had feuded bitterly. One of the people he recruited turned out to be an undercover FBI agent.
Jurors also convicted him on charges that he had killed multiple tigers, sold tiger cubs, and falsified wildlife records. Maldonado-Passage later admitted he fatally shot five tigers and buried them at his zoo, though his attorneys would eventually argue the killings were "medically necessary" and that the animals had been "euthanized."
He was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the convictions but ordered the trial court to resentence him, finding the original penalty had been improperly calculated. The trial court shaved a single year off, leaving him with a 21-year term.
The Supreme Court's docket this term has been crowded with high-profile disputes, including pending arguments on the birthright citizenship executive order. Maldonado-Passage's petition did not make the cut.
Maldonado-Passage became a household name in 2020 when Netflix aired "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness," a documentary that turned his feud with Baskin and his flamboyant zoo operation into binge-worthy television. The show made him famous. It did not make him innocent.
His attorneys pushed two main arguments in seeking Supreme Court review. First, they claimed problems with witness testimony, a contention bolstered, they said, by recantations. Second, they pointed to what they called new evidence that the tiger killings were medically justified rather than criminal.
Neither argument persuaded the 10th Circuit, which had already upheld the convictions. Fox News reported that Maldonado-Passage lost his last appeal before that court in July.
Meanwhile, Baskin, the intended target of the murder plot, urged courts to keep him behind bars. Whatever one thinks of the broader "Tiger King" spectacle, the jury heard the evidence, weighed the testimony, and returned guilty verdicts on every count.
Maldonado-Passage has maintained his innocence throughout. In 2022, before his resentencing, he appealed directly to the trial court.
"Please don't make me die in prison waiting for a chance to be free."
That plea, reported by the Associated Press, did not change the outcome. The court trimmed one year and nothing more.
After Monday's Supreme Court denial, Maldonado-Passage took to X to vent his frustration. The Court's handling of its docket has drawn scrutiny from multiple directions this term, but declining to hear a murder-for-hire case with a clean appellate record is hardly the stuff of controversy.
Fox News reported that Maldonado-Passage wrote on X:
"I lost my appeal for a new trial today. The United States Government wants me to die in prison even though they know their witnesses were lying under Oath."
He also appealed publicly for a presidential pardon, writing: "Make this right and allow me to go home." There is no indication that request has gained traction.
Celebrity culture has a way of softening the edges of serious crime. A documentary with a catchy title and colorful characters can make a convicted felon look like a folk hero. Social media can turn a prison cell into a platform. None of that changes the underlying facts.
Maldonado-Passage was convicted of trying to have a woman killed. He hired people, one of whom was an FBI agent, to carry out the job. An Oklahoma jury said so unanimously. A federal appeals court agreed. And now the Supreme Court has declined to intervene.
The justices this term have faced enormous pressure on cases ranging from immigration authority to executive power. Letting a straightforward murder-for-hire conviction stand required no courage. It required only the absence of a reason to act, and there was none.
Maldonado-Passage's attorneys raised the kinds of arguments defense lawyers raise when the trial record has already been picked over: witness credibility, new evidence, sentencing errors. The 10th Circuit addressed the sentencing issue and corrected it. The rest did not clear the high bar the Supreme Court sets for granting review.
Baskin, whatever her own controversies, was the target of a murder plot. The system worked. A jury convicted. An appeals court affirmed. The highest court in the land saw no reason to look further. The debates over how the Court manages its emergency docket are real and worth having. This case is not part of that debate.
At 63, with a cancer diagnosis and 21 years ahead of him, Maldonado-Passage faces grim arithmetic. That is the consequence of plotting to kill someone and getting caught. Sympathy for a sick man is natural. Leniency for a convicted would-be murderer is something else entirely.
The law did what the law is supposed to do. No Netflix special changes that.
