The man who shot and paralyzed Larry Flynt in 1978 is set to be executed for murder in November, but the Hustler founder wrote in the Hollywood Reporter Thursday that he has mixed feelings about the sentence:
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.
Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to shooting Flynt because of a photo in Hustler that featured a black man with a white woman. Franklin shot and killed interracial couples, civil rights activists, and had bombed synagogues.
“As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice,” Flynt wrote, “and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.”