White supermacist killer executed in Missouri
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A US white supremacist serial killer who also admitted to shooting porn mogul Larry Flynt was put to death in Missouri early yesterday by lethal injection.
Joseph Paul Franklin, who was blamed for a string of killings between 1977 and 1980 he apparently committed in a bid to start a race war, was declared dead at 1217 GMT in Missouri.
A judge had issued a stay temporarily halting the 63-year-old Franklin’s execution, but that order was lifted a short time later, allowing it to proceed.
Franklin, who was put to death for killing Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in St Louis, Missouri in 1977, was serving several life sentences following his three-year-long killing spree.
But he is perhaps most infamous for shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, in an apparent assassination attempt that left him in a wheelchair.
The media mogul wrote last month that he would like to “inflict damage” on Franklin but did not wish to see him die.
Flynt said he was targeted by Franklin “because of a photo spread I ran in Hustler magazine featuring a black man and a white woman. He had bombed several synagogues... He hated blacks, he hated Jews.”
In a recent interview with CNN, Franklin blamed his hatred on a poor upbringing and a family that abused him and stunted his mental development.
He said his goal had been to “get a race war started” and that his targets were Jews, blacks and interracial couples.
“I felt like I was at war. The survival of the white race was at stake,” Franklin said.
“I consider it my mission, my three-year mission. Same length of time Jesus was on his mission, from the time he was 30 to 33,” Franklin told CNN from behind a glass partition at the Missouri prison.
Franklin had been granted a stay after filing an appeal over the use of pentobarbital for a lethal injection, which his attorneys argued carried a high risk of unnecessary pain beyond what was needed to achieve death.
Early yesterday the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Franklin’s lawyers had not provided enough evidence, and overturned that ruling.
The execution was the first in Missouri in nearly three years.
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