Larry Flynt urges clemency for Joseph Paul Franklin, the killer who shot him

[AdamSmith]

Larry Flynt urges clemency for Joseph Paul Franklin, the killer who shot him

Pornographer and civil liberties advocate calls for neo-Nazi to be spared, saying death penalty is 'not justice but vengeance'

• Edward Helmore in New York
• The Observer, Saturday 19 October 2013 08.43 EDT

Larry Flynt: 'This nation is bent on executing people and it’s hard to get people who feel that way to be rational.' Photograph: Dan Tuffs/Getty Images

By the brutal norms of American capital punishment, few recipients of a lethal injection will trouble consciences less deeply than Joseph Paul Franklin.

In a spree of racially motivated violence across the US in the late 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan-affiliated gunman murdered as many as 20 people on a mission to "cleanse the world" of those he considered to be of inferior status.

But if Franklin is strapped down to receive the fatal shot of drugs on 20 November, in conformity with the Missouri Department of Corrections' schedule, at least one of his surviving targets won't be raising a glass in celebration.

"If it was a deterrent, I'd support the death penalty, but it's not," Larry Flynt, the notorious pornographer and civil liberties campaigner who was paralysed by a bullet from Franklin's hunting rifle, told the Observer last week.

Flynt first expressed his views on the death penalty and the sentence of his attacker in the movie-industry trade journal Hollywood Reporter last week.

Referring to Britain in the 18th century, Flynt wrote: "Once a week, crowds would gather in a public square to observe public hangings of convicted pickpockets, unaware that their own pockets were being emptied by thieves moving among them … if you're ever trying to convince somebody of why the death penalty is not a deterrent, that's a good example."

Flynt, whose life at the time of his shooting was depicted in the Milos Forman film The People vs Larry Flynt, is well known for crusading on controversial civil liberties positions. His causes have always been characterised by a fiercely anti-authoritarian streak.

In 1983, after he leaked FBI surveillance tapes showing agents threatening carmaker John DeLorean during a cocaine trafficking sting, Flynt wore the stars and stripes as a nappy and was jailed for six months for desecration of the flag. DeLorean was subsequently exonerated on all drugs charges.

During a spectacularly unsuccessful run for the California governorship in 2003, he referred to himself as "a smut peddler who cares".

Flynt's decision to speak up over Franklin's execution comes nearly 35 years after the gunman's actions put him in a wheelchair. Though never convicted for shooting Flynt, Franklin confessed to the 1978 assassination attempt outside a Florida courthouse years after his rampage was ended by arrest for other crimes in 1980. In his confession, Franklin explained he had shot Flynt because Hustler had published a spread featuring an interracial couple.

The partially sighted neo-Nazi gunman, who was linked to 20 murders, six aggravated assaults, 16 bank robberies and two bombings, was sentenced to death in 1997 for shooting a man outside a bar mitzvah celebration in a suburb of St Louis. Though described as a paranoid schizophrenic by his defence, Franklin – who took the names Joseph Paul after Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels – explained during a lengthy confession that he had wanted to start a race war by travelling the country shooting interracial couples.

Franklin's confession to shooting Flynt did not come till 1994, leaving the publisher at a loss for many years to understand the attack.

"Hustler was pretty controversial at the time and I was being blamed by the religious right for every ill that society embodied," Flynt recalls. "So it didn't surprise me that somebody shot me. I didn't anticipate it, but it didn't surprise me. I was loved by half the country and hated by the other half – and that's not necessarily a good position to be in."

Flynt says his feelings about capital punishment began to crystallise after he was shot. "I have been private about the death penalty because I knew I'd feel like a voice in the wilderness. This nation is bent on executing people and it's hard to get people who feel that way to be rational about anything. But you have to understand that most people are not after justice but after vengeance – and vengeance is wrong."

It is not yet clear that Franklin will actually be executed next month. Missouri is among several states that have exhausted their supplies of the substances used in triple-drug-cocktail executions. Fresenius Kabi, the German manufacturer of the anaesthetic Propofol, used as a single-drug substitute, is demanding the return of supplies.

Last week, Missouri prison officials said they would return a shipment of Propofol nearly a year after the distributor issued an urgent request. However, the officials said they still had a supply of the drug, but did not clarify if there are sufficient quantities for two upcoming executions, including Franklin's.

States running low on execution supplies say they are increasingly turning to independent pharmacists to compound the drugs, opening the way for legal challenges that amount to the head-spinning argument that the drugs used for execution may not be safe for human use.

For Flynt, the method is largely immaterial. "The electric chair, hangings, firing squads – there's a lot of ways to go. Drugs just seem to be the most civilised way – if there is a civilised way.

"I just don't think it makes sense for governments to be in the business of executing people. It costs less to house them than it does to execute them, and I think locking them up in a cell on their own for the rest of their life – that's a far worse punishment than snuffing someone's life out in a matter of seconds."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/19/larry-flynt-clemency-joseph-paul-franklin-crippled

[RA1]

Interesting point of view. I tend to agree except for one point and that is, those executed will not commit any other crimes.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

That much is certain.

My view, as mentioned in past discussions here...

As long as prosecutions and convictions are subject to error, the state has no business imposing an irreversible penalty.

Even if the judicial process could magically be made perfect and error-proof, it seems abhorrent and immoral to me when the state confers on itself the power to kill. So few other states we consider peers see need or justification for it. To take the Judeo-Christian line, "eye for an eye" is not in the Commandments but "Thou shalt not kill" surely is.

Life without parole is a sentence that can be, and has been by at least some states, legislated as ironclad, without escape clauses for anything other than an overturning of conviction. This seems to me less inhumane than the dragged-out uncertainty of today's (and any foreseeable, under our system of justice -- fortunately, I would say) death-penalty process. And less expensive to administer, if that should matter.

[RA1]

As they say in Texas, no waiting if there are at least two eye witnesses. In that case one is put on the "fast track" for execution which should reduce the overhead and holding costs. I fully realize that is a flippant remark and one with which I happen to not personally agree. Eye witnesses are VERY unreliable for one thing and putting every felon to instant death seems a bit too much.

Suppose the US no longer has the death penalty. Are we going to have a jail or prison on every street corner as we now have Walgreen's? We already put into jail a much larger percentage of citizenry than any of those peer states. Our rate of recidivism is also unmatched. I am not suggesting we thin out the prison ranks with death but what is a reasonable solution?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Well, let's see.

Total U.S. prison population 2,266,832 as of Dec. 31, 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate)

Total U.S. death row population 3,108, or 0.14% of total prison population (http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=86)

Even shooting everybody on death row today would make no material difference in the problems you rightly identify. Never mind that the length of time many spend on death row already amounts to just about a life sentence in effect.

Reasonable solutions, as have been discussed here and elsewhere, would seem to lie in such directions as reforming minimum-sentencing guidelines (hopeful signs now starting to appear), shifting drug policy from criminalization to the legislate/tax/treat-as-public-health-issue, as now beginning with marijuana in some states, and so on.

[RA1]

Is bringing up another related topic or side issue the same as multi-tasking? Rightly or wrongly, various states have already outlawed the death penalty. Therefore we seem to be headed towards the no death penalty anyway. Do you demand unanimity or nothing aka no negotiation?

What could or should be the penalty for someone serving a "real" life sentence who murders while incarcerated? Bigger bars on the cell? Bread and water? No TV for 6 months?

Do we have to amend the US Constitution to rid ourselves of the death penalty?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Rightly or wrongly, various states have already outlawed the death penalty. Therefore we seem to be headed towards the no death penalty anyway. Do you demand unanimity or nothing aka no negotiation?

...

Do we have to amend the US Constitution to rid ourselves of the death penalty?

Any route would suit me. State-by-state followed by a SCOTUS pronouncement, if possible. As the immortal Sen. Ervin put it, on some other issue:

The argument of my good friend from Maine that what this amendment is designed to accomplish has already been accomplished by the Byrd amendment reminds me of a story of the man in a distant part of the country who received a telegram from an undertaker informing him that his mother-in-law had died. The telegram of the undertaker closed with the inquiry, "Shall we cremate or bury?"

The man wired back and said, "Take no chances. Cremate and bury."

What could or should be the penalty for someone serving a "real" life sentence who murders while incarcerated? Bigger bars on the cell? Bread and water? No TV for 6 months?

Solitary?

[AdamSmith]

Jimmy Carter calls for fresh moratorium on death penalty

Carter says it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and justices should reintroduce ban that stood from 1972 to 1976

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• theguardian.com, Monday 11 November 2013 09.08 EST

Jimmy Carter said: 'The only consistency today is that the people who are executed are almost always poor, from a racial minority or mentally deficient.' Photo: Reuters

Former US president Jimmy Carter has called for a new nationwide moratorium on the death penalty, arguing that it is applied so unfairly across the 32 states that still have the death sentence that it amounts to a form of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited under the US constitution.

In an interview with the Guardian, Carter calls on the US supreme court to reintroduce the ban on capital punishment that it imposed between 1972 and 1976. The death penalty today, he said, was every bit as arbitrary as it was when the nine justices suspended it on grounds of inconsistency in the case of Furman v Georgia 41 years ago.

“It’s time for the supreme court to look at the totality of the death penalty once again,” Carter said. “My preference would be for the court to rule that it is cruel and unusual punishment, which would make it prohibitive under the US constitution.”

Carter’s appeal for a new moratorium falls at a time of mounting unease about the huge disparities in the use of capital punishment in America. Recent research has shown that most of the 1,352 executions that have taken place since the supreme court allowed them to recommence in 1976 have emanated from just 2% of the counties in the nation.

Amid a critical shortage of medical drugs used in lethal injections caused by a European boycott of US corrections departments, death penalty states are also adopting increasingly desperate execution methods. The new techniques range from deploying previously untested sedatives in lethal injections, to concocting improvised batches of the chemicals through compounding pharmacies.

Carter’s main concern is what he sees as the injustice in the kinds of individuals who are most likely to be sentenced to death and executed. He will be raising his concerns at a national symposium on the death penalty held by the American Bar Association and hosted by his Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday.

“The only consistency today is that the people who are executed are almost always poor, from a racial minority or mentally deficient,” he told the Guardian. “In America today, if you have a good attorney you can avoid the death penalty; if you are white you can avoid it; if your victim was a racial minority you can avoid it. But if you are very poor or mentally deficient, or the victim is white, that’s the way you get sentenced to death.”

He added: “It’s almost inconceivable in these modern days to imagine that a rich white man would be executed if he murdered a black person.”

Carter’s call for a renewed moratorium is particularly significant given his role, paradoxically, in helping to restore the death penalty in the 1970s. In 1973, as governor of Georgia, he signed into law a new set of guidelines that were designed to meet the objections of the supreme court over the inconsistencies in the death penalty set out in the Furman case.

Those new guidelines were reviewed by the supreme court, and on the back of that case – Gregg v Georgia – the nine justices removed their previous injunction and allowed the death penalty to resume. Carter now looks back on the part he played with frank regret.

“If I had to do that over again I would certainly be much more forceful in taking actions that would have prohibited the death penalty,” he said, referring to his signing of the 1973 guidelines. “In complete honesty, when I was governor [of Georgia] I was not nearly as concerned about the unfairness of the application of the death penalty as I am now. I know much more now. I was looking at it from a much more parochial point of view – I didn’t see the injustice of it as I do now.”

In recent years Carter has striven to make up for what he sees as his past weakness on the issue in his home state, which has carried out some of the most controversial judicial killings in modern times. He campaigned vociferously against the execution of Troy Davis in September 2011 amid serious doubts about the prisoner’s guilt .

He continues to campaign in the case of Warren Hill, a Georgia death row inmate who has been declared intellectually disabled (or “mentally retarded” in US jurisprudence) by all the psychiatrists who have examined him, yet still faces execution despite a US supreme court ban on executing intellectually disabled people. “I would hope Georgia would commute Warren Hill’s sentence completely,” Carter said.

At Tuesday’s symposium, the ABA will present the findings of its eight-year examination of the fairness and accuracy of several of the leading death penalty jurisdictions in the US. It has carried out a series of assessments of the way capital punishment is applied in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas – states that represent 65% of all executions that have taken place since 1976.

The ABA has identified 12 areas in which the practice of capital punishment in the US continues to experience serious problems. They include the use of ill-equipped, poorly trained and under-paid lawyers to defend people facing capital prosecutions; racial disparities in the pursuit of cases – in Georgia, those suspected of killing whites are almost five times more likely to be sentenced to death than those suspected of killing blacks; huge variations in the rules relating to DNA testing; widespread confusion among jurors sitting at death penalty trials; and the fact that all the assessed states continue to allow people with severe mental illness to be sentenced to death and executed.

Ed Pilkington will be acting as a moderator at the American Bar Association symposium at the Carter Center on Tuesday

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/jimmy-carter-supreme-court-death-penalty

[RA1]

There are many criminals who have applied "cruel and unusual punishment" on their victims. I do not disagree that the death penalty has been applied unevenly and perhaps even unfairly but if we are going to have the death penalty, should we not try to solve those problems rather than just institute a ban?

Even though I am not a big advocate of the death penalty, like the Supremes recounting their notice of porn, I know when the death penalty should be applied.

What I don't know and think is a larger problem is how to stop recidivism.

Best regards,

RA1