Larry Flynt Fights To Save White Supremacist Who Shot, Paralyzed Him
HOLLYWOOD (CBSLA.com) — Hustler publisher and President Larry Flynt, who has been confined to a wheelchair since being injured in a 1978 shooting in Georgia, is fighting to save the white supremacist who shot him from being executed.
Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Nov. 20. Flynt and the Missouri chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Saturday to force the state to release documents on how state determines the process by which it kills prisoners.
Last month, Missouri delayed the execution of convicted murderer Allen Nicklasson after the German manufacturer of the drug propofol objected to its use in the deadly mixture designed to execute inmates.
Missouri has said it will revise the ingredients of its death cocktail in time to execute Franklin. The state halted lethal injections in 2006 after questions about how a doctor on the death team administered the compound.
Franklin, who told authorities he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, has been convicted of eight racially motivated murders in several states. He was convicted in Missouri of using a hunting rifle to kill a man outside a St. Louis synagogue in 1977.
Franklin claimed responsibility for shooting Flynt, paralyzing him, in 1978 because he was upset at interracial photo spreads in Hustler.
In a guest column in the Hollywood Reporter, Flynt wrote he did not want to see Franklin die.
"As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself," Flynt wrote.
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