#JoeFranklin #whitesupremacist #white #shooting #Larryflint #murder #serialkiller #executed #execution #larryflintsshooter #flint
Ever see the movie The People Vs Larry Flint? If you have
then you know exactly who Larry Flint is, what he does for a living, and what
happened to him. I suggest if you haven’t seen it to watch it if you have the
chance.
Larry Flint is the man who started Hustler Magazine, a
hardcore controversial pornography magazine which features pictures of women in
hardcore nudity as well as politically based articles and cartoon strips. The
magazine is described by some as disgusting and not just because of it’s
imagery but because of its offensive writing style which has been highly
popularized since its inception to make the magazine seem different from
Playboy.
Larry Flint was not a very well-liked man, and not because
he was some evil monster. People didn’t like him because he owned a magazine
which he felt had to cut out the bullshit and get straight to the ‘fucking’
issue. His photography would contain women in explicit hardcore poses,
spreading their legs and genitals in what most people might describe as deviant.
His articles would usually involve satires of public figures engaging in obscene
or taboo sexual affairs. The words “obscene” and “taboo” are really an
understatement though.
A good example of this is when he published a magazine which
contained an article about Jerry Falwell which told a story of Mr. Falwell’s
experiences with consensual incest with his mother. After being sued Flint was asked
in court if he had any proof that Jerry Falwell had sex with his mother, at
which point he denied he had proof of that but implied he had video of Falwell performing
fallatio on a sheep.
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| Larry Flint from 2009 |
Yes Larry certainly had many people in an uproar. But on one
faithful day on March 16th, 1978 Flint was shot by what was then an unknown assailant.
Flint was paralyzed
from the waste down after the shooting and will never be able to walk again.
The shooter was Joseph Paul Franklin, 63 a white supremacist
who was accused of killing as many as 20 other people, targeting blacks and Jews
in a nation-wide killing spree between the years of 1977-1980. He was also the
man who shot civil rights leader Vernon
Jordan in 1980. He was finally caught and sentenced to death after killing a
man named Gerald Gordon near a synagogue in St. Louis, MO
in 1980.
Scheduled to be executed at 12:01AM 11/20/2013, a judge
refused to stay his execution, saying that the crimes committed by Franklin where "cowardly”
and “calculated”. However, another MO judge has decided to stay the execution
of the shooter until the execution protocol is reviewed.
FROM THE ARTICLE:
In her 14-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon, U.S. District
Court Judge Nanette Laughrey criticized the timing of the state's changes to
its lethal-injection procedures, stating that "details of the execution
protocol have been illusive at best."
Larry Flint in my book is a very bad ass civil rights
activist, and what he is doing here is even more astounding. Flint is a guy who is pretty much open to
anything and he shies away from nothing. Homosexuals, transsexuals, bisexuals, heterosexual,
black, white, Asian, Jew, it doesn’t matter who you were. If you were a good
person than you were welcomed as a friend to him, and this is something about
Larry that I think gets over looked too much and I think a lot of that stigma
still involves the fact that he is a hardcore porno publisher and lives a life
that seemingly puts Huge Heffner’s to shame.
That being said, the reason Joe Franklin decided to kill Flint that day was because Flint had published some pictures of an
interracial couple together in the December 1975 edition of Hustler. This was
during a time when racism was still a huge issue in many parts of the country.
To place a black man with a white woman in a pornographic scene together was
unheard of and disgusting to most people.
FROM THE ARTICLE:
'I saw that interracial couple he had, photographed there,
having sex,' he says. Franklin
is referring to the December 1975 issue of Hustler that featured
several photos of a black man with a white woman. 'It just made me sick. I
think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians.
Orientals with orientals. I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill
that guy.'
The amazing part of this whole story is that now we have
come to the end of days for Joe Franklin as far as the government sees it and a
judge granted him a stay of execution. This was because Joe had requested the
stay on the grounds that the drugs used during lethal injection violate the Constitutions
ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
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| Joe Franklin in court |
Flint
himself has rolled forward and call for clemency for Joe as well saying, “"the
government has no business at all being in the business of killing
people." Even though this man shot and paralyzed Flint
nearly ruining his life Flint spoke up about how
he felt about Franklin
being executed. "A life spent in a 3-by-6-foot cell is far harsher than
the quick release of a lethal injection” he said. "I have had many years
in this wheelchair to think about this very topic."
All I can say is that Flintis a man of true character, regardless of his sorted past. There is nothing I
can say about his assailant other than I agree with the previous judge who
called him a “coward”.
However, after hours of delaying the execution Joe Franklin
was finally put to death at 6:07AM CT. He had no final meal and no last
statements.
I’m not making a case for the abolition of the death penalty.
I’m not exactly sure how I feel about the issue. I can tell you I have never
jumped out of my seat and cheered for executing someone for heinous deeds, but
I haven’t sat around raising my voice about capital punishment being bad. Some
people need closure and cannot get it until they feel like justice has been dispensed.
Was justice dispensed though? Is it right to kill someone
for killing another? Either if the person is hateful and despised does that
make it right? I’m not sure of that answer. However I do think that how we
treat others and executing people for crimes will be one of the major factors
that define us as a species.
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