DENVER — The federal appeals court based in Denver has weighed in on the case of Oklahoma’s “Tiger King,” upholding the murder-for-hire convictions of the subject of Netflix’s popular 2020 documentary.
The Tiger King, Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who also goes by “Joe Exotic” and other aliases, is serving 264 months in prison for wildlife crimes and for using interstate facilities in the commission of a plot to kill Florida wildlife activist Carole Baskin. The antagonistic relationship between the two was a key plotline of Netflix’s multipart series that more than 64 million households viewed in just one month since its March 2020 release.
At times, the July 14 opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit mirrored the theatrical nature of the Tiger King's own biography.
“It was a rivalry made in heaven. Joseph Maldonado-Passage, the self-proclaimed ‘Tiger King,’ owned what might have been the nation’s largest population of big cats in captivity,” wrote Judge Gregory A. Phillips for the three-member appellate panel that heard Maldonado-Passage’s case. “Carole Baskin was an animal-rights activist who fought for legislation prohibiting the private possession of big cats. He bred lions and tigers to create big-cat hybrids — some the first of their kind. She saw the crossbreeding of big cats as evil.”
The panel did agree with Maldonado-Passage on one of his claims: that the trial court should have grouped together the charges that arose from his hiring of two different hitmen to murder Baskin. The decision lowered the advisory range of Maldonado-Passage’s sentencing, from a maximum of 327 months to a calculated maximum of 262 months.
> Watch video above: 'Tiger King' tiger moved to Ste. Genevieve
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