Batt Mulls Paradis Clemency Proposal Governor To Meet During Next Two Days With Both Proponents And Opponents

Gov. Phil Batt will meet today and Wednesday with both sides regarding the state parole board’s clemency recommendation for condemned murderer Donald Paradis in preparation for making his decision by week’s end.

Spokeswoman Amy Kleiner said state Republican Sen. James Risch, a former Ada County prosecuting attorney, will serve as the governor’s legal adviser in the matter.

Batt, who supports the death penalty in “appropriate cases,” is the first Idaho governor to be faced with a clemency recommendation in a death penalty case.

Kleiner said that through Monday morning, there had been only a half dozen telephone calls to the governor’s office from private citizens since the Commission of Pardons and Parole voted 3-2 Friday to recommend that Paradis’ death sentence be commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Five of those callers urged Batt to reject clemency. The sixth supported the commission’s recommendation.

The commission’s majority said evidence presented during last week’s two-day hearing convinced it that 19-year-old Kimberly Ann Palmer had not been murdered near Post Falls in June 1980 as prosecutors contend.

But in its statement, the majority declined to embrace completely the defense contention that Palmer had been killed at Paradis’ rented Spokane house while Paradis was gone and that Paradis, on his return to the house, helped move the body so he would not have to explain its presence to police.

The commission’s minority said the clemency recommendation is based on intangible logic, and the minority specifically cited the incongruity of essentially saying that Palmer had been killed in Washington but Paradis should spend the rest of his life in an Idaho prison.

Kleiner said Batt will meet today with Deputy Attorney General Lynn Thomas, who said the recommendation trivializes a judicial system that repeatedly has assessed the Paradis case over 15 years and each time has sustained the guilty verdict and death sentence.

Edwin Matthews, who has been handling Paradis’ appeals since the mid-1980s, is flying back from New York on Wednesday to make his pitch to the governor, who has indicated he also will meet with Correction Board Chairman John Hayden before deciding whether to accept or reject the clemency recommendation.

Kleiner said Batt does not intend now to talk directly with Paradis or members of the parole board.