Police Informant’s Slayer Says He Won’t Appeal His Execution

The condemned killer of a police informant, Maxwell “Mad Max” Hoffman, has filed a petition with the 3rd District Court to drop further appeals so he can be immediately executed.

Hoffman said he could no longer stand the guilt he feels for the murder, but at the same time he said he wanted to use his execution as a platform to protest what he called the unfairness of the death penalty and the living conditions for Death Row inmates.

“It is a very hard and difficult thing to live with the depth of guilt I feel,” Hoffman wrote in the petition. “I won’t have to live the rest of my life out, incarcerated, and plagued daily, year after year, by the thought and knowledge of what I’ve done, and all the pain I’ve caused.”

At the same time, he said he wanted his petition for execution to be a platform for protesting the failure to protect his constitutional rights during his trial and sentencing.

Had that occurred, Hoffman declared, “I most likely would not have been sentenced to die … if even convicted!”

He asked that his attorneys be dismissed and the judge bar everyone from interfering further with his execution.

But one of his appellate attorneys, Charles Peterson of Boise, raised questions about the validity of the petition filed in state court since Hoffman’s appeal is pending in federal court.

Although several death row inmates have at times raised the possibility of ending appeals so they could be executed, only double-murderer Keith Eugene Wells has seen the procedure through, and it took nearly a year. Wells died by lethal injection on Jan. 6, 1994, for beating a couple to death in a Boise bar nearly four years earlier.

And at the time he was condemned eight years ago, Hoffman also said he had been living a nightmare since the murder and wanted to end it all although he eventually let Peterson and Ellison Matthews press his appeals.

Wells is the only person executed in Idaho since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Another 30 people have been sentenced to death, but only 18 remain on death row. Ten had their convictions or sentences voided, one died in prison and Donald Manuel Paradis had his sentence commuted by Gov. Phil Batt.

Hoffman, who turned 40 last Wednesday, was convicted in 1989 of the revenge slaying of Nampa Police drug informant Denise Williams two years earlier. Williams, 28, disappeared in September 1987, eight days after helping police arrest Hoffman associate Richard Holmes.

“It’s been 10 years,” said Assistant Nampa Police Chief Alan Creech, who was the lead investigator on the Williams case. “The guy has the right to die with dignity, and I think he deserves the death penalty for the crime he committed.”

Williams’ body was found in the Owyhee County desert nearly a year after her disappearance. Holmes was allegedly the police “snitch” on the Williams case, and a month after the body was found Holmes was killed during a prison riot by fellow inmate Rodney “Shorty” Araiza.

Araiza was sentenced to life without parole.

Ronald Wages, who was convicted with Hoffman in the Williams slaying, is serving a life sentence.

In his 19-page petition last week to Judge Gerald Weston, who ordered his execution, Hoffman protested what he called the inhumane conditions on death row.

“I was sentenced to death, not to 10 to 15 years of isolation or solitary confinement before my execution,” Hoffman wrote.

“It’s as though my court-ordered sentence isn’t punishment enough as far as the Department of Corrections and the state’s Attorney General’s Office is concerned,” the petition said. “It seems like they are telling the sentencing judge that he fell short and was basically ineffective in doling out sufficient punishment because he failed to add torture and constant torment to the sentence.”