Larry Flynt Doesn’t Want Would-Be Killer To Face Execution

Larry Flynt doesn’t want his would-be killer to face execution next month. Instead, the porn publisher wrote that he wants Joseph Paul Franklin to experienced the same things he has experienced since he almost died in 1978.

Franklin, a white supremacist, is on death row in Missouri for several racially motivated murders. He was in 1980 for a string of shootings that killed five people and wounded several others.

After he was convicted of his fifth murder, Yahoo! News reports that Franklin asked for the death penalty. However, Flynt doesn’t think his attacker deserves capital punishment.

Instead, Larry Flynt published a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter arguing that Franklin should instead be confined to a small cell for the rest of his life — after the publisher spends an hour with him. Flynt explained:

“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. But, I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die.”

Flynt was left paralyzed from the waist down by Franklin’s bullets, and while the white supremacist confessed to shooting Flynt, he was never convicted of it. Along with shootings, the serial killer also bombed several synagogues and claimed to hat blacks, Jews, and all other minorities.

But for all the wrong he did, Flynt commented that he doesn’t think capital punishment is a deterrent to murder. He added that “research has failed to provide a shred of valid scientific proof to that effect.” Flynt argued that it is also less expensive for an inmate to spend his life in a “3-by-6-foot cell” than be executed, because of the cost of appeals.

He added of Franklin’s impending execution, “I have every reason to be overjoyed with this decision, but I am not.” Instead, Flynt explained, “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.”

Do you agree with Larry Flynt’s views on the death penalty? Does Joseph Paul Franklin deserve to die, or should he spend the rest of his life in a small cell?

[Image via s_bukley / Shutterstock.com]