Paradis Clemency Lauded, Rapped Doubts About The Killing Lead Batt To Commute Sentence

Gov. Phil Batt’s decision to grant clemency to convicted killer Donald Manuel Paradis is drawing a mixed reaction.

Lawyers and others who have battled to spare the 47-year-old former motorcycle club member from being executed for a 1980 murder he says he didn’t commit rejoiced late Friday after Batt announced that he would approve the Commission on Pardons and Parole’s recommendation for clemency.

But Marc Haws, an assistant U.S. attorney who helped Kootenai County prosecute Paradis in 1981, said Batt was manipulated by the media and defense lawyers.

“I’m disappointed that an Idaho governor would overturn the just verdict handed down by an Idaho jury and a just sentence imposed by an Idaho judge,” Haws said.

He said “crafty defense attorneys” and “an amazing propaganda campaign” by a Boise newspaper “have done a disservice to the people of the state of Idaho.”

A juror who voted in 1981 to convict Paradis of killing 19-year-old Kimberly Palmer called it “a slap in the face.”

Becky Baeth of Coeur d’Alene last week urged the parole board not to recommend clemency.

“I feel it should have been left the way it was,” she said. “Even with all the new evidence I heard, I’m still convinced he’s guilty, the same that we found him 15 years ago.”

Batt didn’t say he felt that Paradis was innocent, but said since there’s an element of doubt in the case, the death penalty should not be imposed.

“I do not think the death penalty should be imposed if there is any doubt about the guilt of the accused person,” the governor said Friday evening. “In this case, there is some element of doubt.”

Batt, who says he supports the death penalty in appropriate cases, is the first governor to commute a death sentence. Prior to the late 1980s, the Commission on Pardons and Parole had that final authority.

A commission majority had sufficient doubt about the facts surrounding the death of Palmer that it recommended commuting the sentence to life in prison without possibility of parole. Paradis’ attorneys said he laughed and then broke into tears when he was informed by telephone of Batt’s decision.

“He’s talking to his mother, and he’s going to call his daughter,” attorney Bill Mauk said. “He told me that he has had all of his stuff in his cell packed and ready to move all week. He had a dream that told him should pack his stuff.”

Prison spokeswoman Ann Thompson said Paradis would undergo reclassification and be reassigned elsewhere in the prison. Thompson did not know exactly how long that would take.

Mauk said Saturday he considered calling the governor’s aides to attempt to get Paradis moved out of the isolation of Death Row during the weekend, but decided against it because key officials would not be available to complete the paperwork. Mauk said nothing is likely to happen before Tuesday.

The governor’s decision ended a week he has devoted almost exclusively to the clemency appeal. Then Friday morning, Camille Tillinghast, the parole board member who engineered the 3-2 majority that recommended clemency, told the governor there was just too much uncertainty to justify execution.

“I told him my bottom line here was there are too many unanswered questions that can’t be answered,” Tillinghast said. “Just the fact that there are still unanswered questions among professionals, … we can’t take a man’s life and live with that. What if we’re wrong?”

When the commission made its recommendation last week, Deputy Attorney General Lynn Thomas called it inconceivable that 15 years of court rulings against Paradis could be ignored.

Thomas’ boss, Attorney General Alan Lance, was conciliatory.

The governor, Lance said, “has carefully reviewed the case and accepted the recommendations. … It was one of the toughest decisions our governor has yet had to make.”

Paradis maintained that Palmer was strangled not in Idaho but in his rented Spokane house along with her boyfriend Scott Currier and that he was not there when either died. He claimed his only crime was helping dump the two bodies near Post Falls so he would not have to explain them to police.

But prosecutors have contended for 15 years that Currier was killed in Spokane and Palmer was murdered near Post Falls, where Paradis, Thomas Henry Gibson and Larry Evans decided to dump the bodies. Gibson, 44, is also fighting execution for Palmer’s murder.

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