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Location |
Defendant |
Date of Crime |
| Kootenai County, ID | Donald Paradis | June 21, 1980 (Post Falls) |
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Donald Manuel Paradis was sentenced to death for the murder of 19-year-old Kimberly Anne Palmer. Paradis was a leader of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang. Prior to the murder he allowed a number of people to use his home in Spokane, WA. On June 21, 1980, Palmer was strangled to death in his home and her boyfriend, Scott Currier, was beaten to death. Paradis was not home at the time of the crime. The victims' killers have since been established, and both the killers and other witnesses made it clear that Paradis had nothing to do with the killings. When Paradis came home and found the bodies, he feared he would be accused of the murders. So he and two other men wrapped the bodies in sleeping bags and put them in a car. He then drove the bodies across the state line and dumped them in Post Falls, Idaho. Paradis was tried in Washington for the murder of Currier, but was acquitted. William Brady, the pathologist who performed an autopsy on Palmer, fostered the impression that Palmer had been killed in Idaho. Brady's improbable theory became the basis for Idaho authorities to prosecute Paradis for the murder of Palmer. Brady was later fired from his job as a medical examiner in nearby Oregon. An investigation showed that he had used state facilities to perform private autopsies, had sold human tissue for profit, and had saved human blood collected during autopsies for use in his garden. At trial, Paradis's court-appointed lawyer was William Brown. Brown had never studied criminal law, never tried a felony case, and never tried a case before a jury. He was also working as a police officer in Coeur D'Alene at the same time he was representing Paradis at his Coeur D'Alene trial. Some of the prosecution witnesses were Brown's fellow police officers. Brown's defense of Paradis lasted three hours. In 1996, Idaho Governor Batt commuted Paradis's death sentence to life without parole. In April 2001, a federal judge vacated Paradis's conviction because prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors then dropped charges against Paradis after he pled guilty to moving a corpse. He was sentenced to five years in prison and released for time served as he had already served 21 years. (NY Times) [9/08] |
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www.victimsofthestate.org |