From The New Zealand Harald

Larry Flynt vs capital punishment

Pornographer, civil liberties campaigner opposes death penalty for man who shot him nearly 35 years ago.

Larry Flynt says his feelings about capital punishment
began to crystallise after he was shot.

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 November 20, 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,” said Larry Flynt, the notorious pornographer and civil liberties campaigner who was paralysed by a bullet from Franklin’s hunting rifle.