|
 The Supreme Court's decision upholds a federal appeals court's
ruling that lifted a stay of execution a judge had issued earlier.
The appeals court's earlier ruling overturned U.S. District Court
Judge Nanette Laughrey, who held that the Missouri Department of
Corrections "has not provided any information about the
certification, inspection history, infraction history, or other
aspects of the compounding pharmacy or of the person compounding the
drug." She noted that the execution protocol, which has changed
repeatedly, "has been a frustratingly moving target."
The state's death warrant for Franklin allows the execution to be
carried out anytime Wednesday. After Laughrey ruled in his favor,
Franklin's attorney, Jennifer Herndon, said Franklin's mental
illness was likely keeping him from comprehending the developments.
Franklin, 63, was convicted of seven other murders, but the Missouri
case was the only one resulting in a death sentence. Franklin also
has admitted to shooting and wounding civil rights leader Vernon
Jordan and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who has been
paralyzed from the waist down since the attack in 1978.
Like other states, Missouri long had used a three-drug execution
method. Drugmakers stopped selling those drugs to prisons and
corrections departments, so in April 2012 Missouri announced a new
one-drug execution protocol using propofol. The state planned to use
propofol for an execution last month.
But Gov. Jay Nixon ordered the Missouri Department of Corrections to
come up with a new drug after an outcry from the medical profession
over planned use of the popular anesthetic in an execution. Most
propofol is made in Europe, and the European Union had threatened to
limit exports of it.
The corrections department turned to pentobarbital made through a
compounding pharmacy. Few details have been made public about the
compounding pharmacy, because state law provides privacy for parties
associated with executions.
Missouri has joined other states in choosing pentobarbital as the
drug of choice. Texas switched to a lethal, single dose of the
sedative pentobarbital in 2012. South Dakota has carried out two
executions using the sedative from a compounding pharmacy. Georgia
has said it's also taking that route.
Franklin was in his mid-20s when he began drifting across the
country. He bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July 1977.
No one was hurt, but soon, the killings began.
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He arrived in the St. Louis area in October 1977 and picked out the
Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue from the Yellow Pages. He
fired five shots at the parking lot in Richmond Heights after a bar
mitzvah on Oct. 8, 1977. One struck and killed Gerald Gordon, a
42-year-old father of three.
Franklin got away. His killing spree continued another three years.
Several of his victims were interracial couples. He 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 finally 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 after that in
Florida.
Overall, 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. He was sentenced to death in 1997.
In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday, Franklin
insisted he no longer hates blacks or Jews. While he was held at St.
Louis County Jail, he said he interacted with blacks at the jail,
"and I saw they were people just like us."
He has made similar statements to other media but has denied
repeated interview requests from The Associated Press. Herndon said
Franklin's reasoning exemplified his mental illness: Franklin told
her the digits of the AP's St. Louis office phone number added up to
what he called an "unlucky number," so he refused to call it.
[Associated
Press; JIM SALTER]
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