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Hustler's Larry Flynt Wants To Save Life Of White Supremacist Who Shot Him
Larry Flynt is fighting to stop the execution of the man who shot and paralyzed him (Photo by Vince Bucci/Getty Images)
The clock is ticking for a convicted murderer and white supremacist leader, who is scheduled for lethal injection on Nov. 20, and Hustler's Larry Flynt is working around the clock to stop his execution.
It's a surprising move for him, as Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, shot Flynt 35 years ago outside of Georgia courthouse; Flynt has been paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair ever since. The former Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party leader had admitted to targeting Flynt for publishing a magazine spread in Hustler of a interracial couple. In addition, he had admitted to nearly two dozen racially-charged murders, the bombing a Tennessee synagogue, and the high-profile shooting of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan.
Over the weekend, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a suit on behalf of Flynt in Missouri, where Franklin will be executed, asking for more transparency in releasing public documents as to how the state decides how to execute its inmates, according to Associated Press.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
“I find it totally absurd that a government that forbids killing is allowed to use that same crime as punishment,” Flynt said in a written statement. “But, until the death penalty is abolished, the public has a right to know the details about how the state plans to execute people on its behalf.”
Missouri has faced controversy over the anesthetic propofol it had been planning on using, and in October, Gov. Jay Nixon put a stop to the execution of another murderer, Allen Nicklasson. He had the state revise the concoction in response to protests from the European manufacturer of the lethal cocktail.
Flynt opposes the death penalty, and has been spreading his message in the media. He penned a column in The Hollywood Reporter in October discussing how he felt capitol capital punishment doesn't deter people from murdering others, and that the death penalty was more of an act of vengeance rather than justice.
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"I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers, so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me," Flynt wrote. "But, I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die."
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