Former zoo owner and reality TV superstar Joe Exotic has been resentenced to 21 years in prison for his role in a murder-for-hire plot, a federal judge said Friday.
The resentencing — a shortening of just one year — came despite pleas from his lawyers after an appeals court ordered a new sentence. Supporters were hoping the zookeeper would be freed from prison.
The star of the hit Netflix show “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, was sentenced to 22 years in January 2020 after he was convicted of hiring two men to kill animal rights activist Carole Baskin. He was also convicted on 17 wildlife charges.
Baskin, the CEO of Big Cat Rescue and a former “Dancing with the Stars” contestant, was also featured in the show, as Maldonado-Passage’s archrival.
In July a federal appeals court ruled that the trial court should’ve treated his two murder-for-hire convictions as one when calculating his prison sentence, since both involved the same goal.
Maldonado, who’s currently housed in a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, announced late last year that he had prostate cancer.
Last month, his attorneys said he was delaying treatment for prostate cancer until after the resentencing.
“Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” became a national obsession during the first weeks of the pandemic, in 2020.
It told the story Joe Exotic — a “gay, gun-toting cowboy with a mullet” who married two husbands at the same time and who owned nearly 90 big cats — who was accused of hiring someone to murder Baskin.
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