The state of Missouri executed 63-year-old Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist murderer who targeted blacks and Jews during a multistate killing spree between 1977 and 1980, St. Louis Dispatch reported.
The death sentence was administered by lethal injection of the single drug pentobarbital. Franklin's attorneys argued that the the injection would violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, CNN reported. His death was confirmed at 6:17, twelve minutes after Missouri Governor Jay Nixon gave the final go-ahead for the execution.
Franklin claimed responsibility for as many as 20 murders in the three years. He bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee in July 1977. When he arrived in the St. Louis area in October 1977, he fired five shots at the parking lot outside a bar mitzvah at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue, which struck and killed 42-year-old Gerald Gordon.
"The cowardly and calculated shootings outside a St. Louis-area synagogue were part of Joseph Paul Franklin's long record of murders and other acts of extreme violence across the country, fueled by religious and racial hate," Governor Nixon said in a statement. Franklin was put to death for the 1977 sniper killing of Gordon at a Richmond Heights synagogue, according to news reports.
Frankling also "shot and killed, among others, two black children in Cincinnati, three female hitchhikers and a white 15-year-old prostitute, with whom he was angry because the girl had sex with black men. He... stumbled after killing two young black men in Salt Lake City in August 1980. He was arrested a month later in Kentucky, briefly escaped, and was captured for good a month [later] in Florida," The Washington Post reported.
Franklin admitted to the attempted assassinations of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978 and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan in 1980. Flynt, who was paralyzed by Franklin's bullet, has called for clemency for Franklin, saying "the government has no business at all being in the business of killing people," as reported by CNN.
All total "Franklin was convicted of eight murders: two in Madison, Wis., two in Cincinnati, two in Salt Lake City, one in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the one in St. Louis County. Years later, in federal prison, Franklin admitted to several crimes, including the St. Louis County killing," according to news reports.
