The People Versus

As if the war on judicial drugs were not enough, the Christian state of Missouri must now contend with the Satanic moralising of a notorious pornographer. Missouri is all lubed up to kill Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist bandit, bomber and multiple murderer who killed perhaps twenty people out of a deluded sense of what really constitutes social inferiority in the United States. One of Franklin's victims was Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine and convicted defiler of the Stars and Stripes, who was shot and paralysed by the prospective martyr almost thirty-five years ago. Flynt opposes the execution on the grounds that "vengeance is wrong", although he also expressed some doubt as to whether a life sentence in an American penitentiary - which Franklin has, in effect, already served - would be much more fun than the lethal injection. Meanwhile, it remains uncertain whether the Christian state of Missouri has enough drugs in stock to redeem Franklin's debt to society without incurring legal challenges about the fitness for human consumption of the poison they use to kill him.