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 The 63-year-old Franklin targeted blacks and Jews in a
cross-country killing spree from 1977 to 1980. He was executed
Wednesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre for killing Gerald
Gordon in a sniper shooting outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue
in 1977.
Franklin was convicted of seven other murders across the country and
claimed responsibility for up to 20 overall. The Missouri case was
the only one that brought a death sentence.
The execution was the first in Missouri using a single drug,
pentobarbital.
Franklin's fate was sealed early Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld a federal appeals court decision overturning stays
granted Tuesday. ___
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE.
AP's earlier story is below. ___
The U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition early Wednesday seeking a
stay of execution for white supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul
Franklin, who is scheduled to die in Missouri.
The decision upheld a federal appeals court's ruling that lifted a
stay of execution issued late Tuesday, just hours before Franklin
had been scheduled to die by lethal injection for killing
42-year-old Gerald Gordon in a sniper attack outside a suburban St.
Louis synagogue in 1977.
Franklin's lawyer had launched three separate appeals: One claiming
his life should be spared because he is mentally ill; one claiming
faulty jury instruction when he was given the death penalty; and one
raising concern about Missouri's first-ever use of a new execution
drug, pentobarbital.
The rulings lifting the stay were issued without comment.
The state's death warrant for Franklin allows the execution to be
carried out anytime Wednesday.
Like other states, Missouri had long 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 the European Union threatened to limit
exports of the popular anesthetic if the United States used it in an
execution, prompting an outcry among U.S. medical professionals.
Missouri then joined other states in selecting pentobarbital as the
drug of choice for executions, produced by a compounding pharmacy.
Texas switched to a lethal, single dose of the sedative in 2012.
South Dakota has carried out two executions using the drug. Georgia
has said it's also taking that route.
The appeals and supreme court rulings overturned U.S. District Court
Judge Nanette Laughrey decision late Tuesday. She 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."
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Franklin's attorney, Jennifer Herndon, said at the time that his
mental illness was likely keeping him from comprehending the
developments.
Franklin was convicted in eight murders altogether, but the Missouri
case was the only one resulting in a death sentence. He is suspected
in as many as 20 killings targeting blacks and Jews across the
country from 1977 to 1980.
Franklin has also 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.
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.
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.
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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