Q&A on the News

Q: I read in the AJC where Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt is trying to keep his shooter, Joseph Franklin, from being executed in Missouri. Why wasn't Franklin arrested and tried in Georgia in the shooting of Flynt in 1978? — William McKee Jr., Flowery Branch

A: Franklin, who has confessed to the shooting of Flynt outside of the Lawrenceville courthouse in March 1978, has never been tried in Gwinnett County because he already was serving time. Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter has said Franklin has been punished for other crimes and a trial wouldn't be a wise use of county resources, a stance he repeated to Q&A on the News in an email. "My reasoning's still the same," Porter wrote last week. "Why would I bring that circus to town?" Franklin, who was sentenced to death for killing Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in 1977, has been convicted of six other killings and is suspected of at least two dozen others, according to The Associated Press. In 1982, he was acquitted in the 1980 shooting of attorney and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, who later became an adviser to President Bill Clinton. Franklin, 63, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday at the Eastern Reception and Diagnostic Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Mo. Flynt, who has been paralyzed since the shooting, was on trial on an obscenity charge when he was shot. He opposes the death penalty in Franklin's case. "I have advocated that Franklin should spend the remainder of his life in prison rather than be killed," Flynt wrote in a court filing.