Larry Flynt does not want Joseph Paul Franklin to be executed
Larry Flynt has said he does not want Joseph Paul Franklin – the man who put him in a wheelchair – to face the death penalty.
Joseph Paul Franklin, who shot Larry Flynt outside a Georgia court in 1978, is set for execution in Missouri in November.
“I have every reason to be overjoyed with this decision, but I am not,” Larry Flynt told the Hollywood Reporter.
“I would love an hour in a room with him… so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me. But, I do not want to… see him die.”
White supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, who is being executed for killing Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in 1977, has been convicted of a total of eight racially motivated murders across the US between 1977 and 1980.
Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to, or was implicated in, 13 additional racial murders.
Larry Flynt has said he does not want Joseph Paul Franklin, the man who put him in a wheelchair, to face the death penalty
The killer said he targeted Larry Flynt after the publisher featured a black man and white woman in a photoshoot in Hustler, the magazine that formed the cornerstone of his entertainment business.
“He hated blacks, he hated Jews, he hated all minorities,” Larry Flynt wrote.
The entertainment mogul, who suffered permanent spinal cord damage, was left paralyzed from the waist down after the shooting.
The events were dramatized in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love.
“As far as the severity of punishment is concerned, to me, a life spent in a 3-by-6-foot cell is far harsher than the quick release of a lethal injection,” wrote Larry Flynt, now 70, in a guest column this week.
The publisher, who has never met Joseph Paul Franklin face-to-face, says he does not believe the death penalty is a deterrent.
“I have had many years in this wheelchair to think about this very topic,” Larry Flynt wrote.
“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.”
In a statement in August, Missouri attorney general Chris Koster said by setting an execution date of November 20, the court had taken “an important step to see that justice is finally done for the victims and their families”.