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(CN) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal from Joseph “Joe Exotic” Maldonado-Passage, the Tiger King star whose bungled attempt to have an animal rights activist killed earned him a decadeslong prison sentence and national infamy.
Maldonado-Passage, 63, argued in a petition for writ of certiorari that the high court should review his case for evidentiary issues, including recanted witness testimony.
The court denied the petition without comment, leaving the animal handler’s 21-year prison sentence intact.
The story of Maldonado-Passage’s poisonous feud with Carol Baskin, the owner of Big Cat Rescue, became a national obsession after the release of the 2020 Netflix documentary “Tiger King.”
Baskin’s attempts to shut down the private zoo owner’s business escalated into a tit-for-tat battle between the big cat fanatics that spilled into the courts and social media. Without evidence, Maldonado-Passage accused Baskin on his Youtube channel of killing her second husband, who disappeared in 1997, and rebranded his traveling show “Big Cat Rescue Entertainment” to conflate his business with Baskin’s. The ploy led to a trademark infringement case that Maldonado-Passage settled for $1 million.
In 2018, Maldonado-Passage was arrested after hiring two men, one of them an undercover FBI agent, to murder Baskin. Maldonado-Passage was convicted at trial on two counts of murder-for-hire, as well as other animal-related offenses, and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
A year was shaved off the sentence after the 10th Circuit ruled in 2021 that the two murder-for-hire offenses should be grouped for sentencing purposes, but the court has refused to overturn his convictions.
Maldonado-Passage argued in his petition to the Supreme Court that the lower courts “shrugged off” evidence three witnesses had recanted their trial testimony, include Allen Glover, a zoo employee and the other hired hitman, and James Garretson, a Florida businessman.
The zoo owner added federal prosecutors failed to disclose to the defense that the witnesses were promised immunity for their testimony.
The 10th Circuit determined the new evidence was unlikely to change the result of the trial.
Maldonado-Passage is scheduled to be released from federal prison in 2036. He will be 73.
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