Paradis’ Attorneys Optimistic After Meeting Batt Asked ‘A Lot Of Questions’ During Hearing

Lawyers for condemned murderer Donald Paradis emerged from two hours with Gov. Phil Batt on Wednesday, cautiously optimistic he will grant clemency in the 1980 slaying of Kimberly Ann Palmer.

“Obviously, after 15 years you have to be very cautious,” lawyer Edwin Matthews said on leaving the governor’s Capitol office.

“He asked us a lot of questions. We discussed the case thoroughly,” Matthews said. “He did not give us any indication how he’s going to go. … I think he’s trying to do the right thing. He’s taking it very seriously.”

Batt said he still hoped to decide this week whether to accept the recommendation of the Commission on Pardons and Parole to commute the death sentence to life in prison without parole.

But he said he wanted to meet with some of the commission members today and may even talk with U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge, whose April 1 denial of Paradis’ last ditch appeal triggered the clemency process.

“It’s not an easy decision,” Batt said.

Paradis, 47, has contended for more than a decade that new evidence developed since his 1981 trial shows he did not kill the 19-year-old Spokane woman near Post Falls as prosecutors argued.

In his appeal denial, Lodge said that if new evidence does exist, the proper place for its consideration is an executive clemency proceeding.

And three members of the five-member commission said last Friday that they were convinced by medical and forensic experts called by both sides during a hearing that Palmer was not killed where prosecutors said. That majority stopped short, however, of exonerating Paradis in what it conceded was a compromise recommendation.

The governor’s staff said telephone calls from the public had picked up on Wednesday to over 100 but were about evenly divided for and against clemency. Up until Wednesday, the office had received only a few dozen calls with a solid majority opposing clemency.

A day earlier, the state’s top criminal lawyers and Palmer’s mother, Sherry Britz, urged Batt to reject clemency, contending Paradis’ petition only tried to change old facts with new words. Deputy Attorney General Lynn Thomas has said eight court rulings over 15 years upholding the conviction and execution should not be ignored.

Correction Board Chairman John Hayden, who discussed the case with Batt earlier this week, had cautioned the parole board about doing just that.

Batt said he still did not intend to speak directly with Paradis, whose court appeals are all but exhausted.

But earlier in the day during an interview on KIDO radio in Boise, Paradis said that if he could talk to the governor, “I’d tell him that I wasn’t guilty, that it didn’t happen in Idaho, that I wasn’t there, that I’m confident he’d weigh the board’s decision and do the right thing.”

There are 19 other murderers on Death Row. Idaho has executed only 12 men since statehood. The last, and the only one demanding he be executed, was Keith Eugene Wells, who died by lethal injection on Jan. 6, 1994.