Attempts To Save Paradis Misguided

In a desperate attempt to save convicted murderer Donald Manuel Paradis, two New Yorkers shamelessly have appealed to the court of public opinion.

Attorney Edwin Matthews and his wife, Patricia, can’t win in any other court.

The Matthewses have tried to enlist movie stars in their cause celebre, asking actor Dustin Hoffman to use his influence with former Idaho Attorney General Larry EchoHawk to arrange a clemency deal, and have repeated their revisionist tale of Paradis’ “innocence” to all who would listen.

Some have.

The New Yorker magazine and ABC television’s “Day One” produced lengthy accounts arguing that Paradis was convicted wrongly for the 1980 murder of Kimberly Palmer in Post Falls. A TV movie also is in the works. And, of course, a couple of religious leaders have climbed aboard the Paradis bandwagon.

For all the attention, you’d think Paradis were a Gandhi figure, a political prisoner unjustly being held by a ruthless Third World dictatorship. But he isn’t. He’s a coldblooded criminal who was convicted of brutally murdering a young woman after he and/or his biker friends had tortured and killed her boyfriend in Paradis’ Spokane home.

District, state and federal courts have pored over this case for more than a decade since Paradis and his biker buddy, Thomas Gibson, were convicted of Palmer’s murder in separate jury trials. All have turned thumbs down on Paradis’ appeals.

Yet, the Matthewses persist, embracing as gospel the favorable, self-serving testimony of disreputable eyewitnesses such as Gibson while denigrating the memory of respected Coeur d’Alene public defender Bill Brown.

Patricia Matthews insists that Paradis was represented badly by a “bumbling court-appointed lawyer six months out of law school.” But in 1986, the Idaho Supreme Court opined that Brown had done “a superb job in litigating this issue.” Whom are you going to believe - an unbiased group of Idaho’s best legal minds or a crusading couple opposed to capital punishment?

The Matthewses could learn from novelist Norman Mailer’s misguided advocacy for a hardened criminal. In the early 1980s, Mailer helped jailhouse author Jack Henry Abbott win parole, enabling Abbott to kill again. Within months of his release, Abbott knifed a young New York waiter in a dispute over a restroom and was shipped back to prison.

There has been a miscarriage of justice in the Paradis case. But it isn’t the one Edwin and Patricia Matthews claim.

It’s a crime that Paradis and Gibson haven’t been executed already.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board