Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who targeted blacks and Jews in a cross-country killing spree from 1977 to 1980, was put to death on Wednesday in Missouri, the state’s first execution using a single drug, pentobarbital.
Franklin, 63, was executed at the state prison in Bonne Terre for killing Gerald Gordon in a sniper shooting at a suburban St Louis synagogue in 1977. Franklin was convicted of seven other murders across the country and claimed responsibility for up to 20 overall, but the Missouri case was the only one that brought a death sentence.
Franklin also admitted to shooting and wounding civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who has been paralysed from the waist down since the attack in 1978. Flynt had sued to stop Franklin’s execution because he doesn’t believe the death penalty is a deterrent.
Mike O’Connell, of the Missouri Department of Corrections, said Franklin was pronounced dead at 6.17am. It was the state’s first execution in nearly three years.
Franklin’s fate was sealed early on Wednesday when the US Supreme Court upheld a federal appeals court ruling that overturned two stays granted on Tuesday evening by district court judges in Missouri.
Franklin’s lawyer had launched three separate appeals: one claiming his life should be spared because he is mentally ill; one claiming faulty jury instruction when he was given the death penalty; and one raising concern about Missouri’s first-ever use of pentobarbital.