Opinion Columnist
Missouri had its first execution in three years last Wednesday.
A lethal injection of pentobarbital killed white supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
Franklin was originally put on death row for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon, one of a group of Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in Richmond Heights, Mo.
Franklin murdered an estimated 22 people during his killing spree across the U.S. from 1977 to 1980. Franklin confessed to several of his crimes, including the senseless murder of two African American boys, aged 13 and 14, whom he decided to shoot while waiting to murder a racially mixed couple in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He had been on death row for 15 years before Larry Flynt, well-known publisher of “Hustler” magazine, urged clemency for the man who attempted to shoot him dead in 1978 for publishing pictures of interracial sex.
In a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter on Oct.17, Flynt addressed his reasons for wanting to spare Franklin’s life:
“I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself,” he wrote.
Although his reaction to Franklin’s then-upcoming execution came as a surprise to the public, as well as myself, I have to agree with Flynt and argue that although capital punishment is intended for justice, its existence is only a reminder of the inequality that remains within the United States’ legal system.
What determines which crimes are absurd enough to be punishable by death?
In the state of Colorado, treason, first-degree murder with at least one of 17 aggravating factors and first-degree kidnapping resulting in death are all crimes punishable by death, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The problem with this is that there are countless murderers who never get put on death row, are only sentenced to life or who are released from prison eventually.
In executions that have occurred since 1976, 76 percent of murder victims were white. Nationally, only 50 percent of murder victims are white. According to a fact sheet by the Death Penalty Information Center, a California study found that “those who killed whites were over three times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks and over four times more likely than those who killed Latinos.”
What does this say about the value of a person’s life based on the color of their skin? Is it improbable to question whether Franklin would have been put on death row had he not killed a white man outside of that synagogue? And why wouldn’t the futile murder of those two young black boys be enough to put him on death row?
There are always degrees of wrongfulness in regards to crimes, especially murders. The state should not be able to take away a person’s right to life when that right comes before the state. The death penalty should apply to everyone or no one at all – and by that I mean it should apply to no one. Living a life devoid of meaning inside a prison cell seems to me to be far worse punishment than dying within ten minutes by lethal injection.
arildefonso@mavs.coloradomesa.edu
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