Missouri executes serial killer amid lethal injection drug concerns

Missouri executed a convicted white supremacist serial killer on Wednesday morning despite concerns over the state's lethal injection drugs.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling from the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals early Wednesday that Missouri could proceed with Franklin's execution, just hours after a lower court blocked the execution and claimed Missouri's disputed lethal injection protocol must be resolved before the execution could go forward.

In that reprieve, U.S. District Court Judge Nanette Laughrey had ruled 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."

The state's death warrant for Franklin allowed the execution to be carried out anytime Wednesday. After Laughrey ruled in Franklin's favor, his attorney, Jennifer Herndon, said Franklin's mental illness was likely keeping him from comprehending the developments.

Franklin, 63, was convicted of seven other murders, but the Missouri case was the only one resulting in a death sentence.

He 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 Franklin attacked him in 1978.

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 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 an outcry from medical professionals over the planned use of the popular anesthetic in an execution.

Most propofol is made in Europe, and the European Union, which bans capital punishment, had threatened to limit exports of it.

The corrections department turned to pentobarbital made through a compounding pharmacy. Few details have been made public about the compounding pharmacy — a type of pharmacy that is regulated by individual states rather than the stricter federal Food and Drug Administration — because state law provides privacy for parties associated with executions.

Missouri has joined other states in choosing pentobarbital as the drug of choice. Texas switched to a lethal single dose of the sedative in 2012. South Dakota has carried out two executions using pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy. Georgia has said it's also taking that route.

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 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 a month after that in Florida.

Overall, Franklin was convicted of eight murders: two in Madison, Wis., two in Cincinnati, two in Salt Lake City, one in Chattanooga and the one in St. Louis County. Years later, in federal prison, he 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 the St. Louis County Jail, he said he interacted with blacks, "and I saw they were people just like us."

He made similar statements to other media but rejected repeated interview requests from The Associated Press.

Herndon, Franklin's lawyer, said the killer's reasoning for refusing an interview exemplified his mental illness: he 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.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press