Ga. death-row case shows power of social media

A social media campaign to stop an execution in Georgia next week is drawing support from hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Celebrities, Nobel laureates and national leaders have joined the NAACP, Amnesty International and the grassroots group Change.org to urge Georgia authorities to grant clemency to Troy Davis, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday. They are flooding Twitter with several tweets a minute, signing online petitions and, starting today, planning to rally around the country.

Davis, 42, who was convicted in the 1989 shooting death of Savannah, Ga., police officer Mark MacPhail. His supporters say he is innocent, noting that 10 witnesses in the case have signed affidavits recanting their testimony and indicating that police coerced them into implicating Davis. They also point out that nine people have signed affidavits implicating another man.

The case has attracted attention for years. Former president Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu are among the prominent figures who have urged that Davis' life be spared.

In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Davis a hearing to prove his innocence, the first time it had done so for a death row inmate in at least 50 years.

During that June 2010 hearing, two witnesses said they falsely incriminated Davis and two others said another man had confessed to being MacPhail's killer in the years since Davis' trial. U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. said the testimony cast some doubt on Davis' conviction, but was not enough to grant a new trial.

The latest effort, triggered when a new execution date was set last week, includes celebrities John Legend, Mia Farrow, Bianca Jagger and the Indigo Girls. All are tweeting under #TooMuchDoubt, the search term devised by Amnesty International and the NAACP. Davis supporters also have created Facebook pages.

"In the moment, when our nation stumbles toward complete failure of its justice system, we have to give every citizen the opportunity to express their outrage and their intention that the state not do this in their name," says NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous.

"When the state executes an innocent person, every citizen is implicated in that act."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-09-15/Troy-Davis-clemency-social-media-Georgia-death-row/50420410/1

Ga. death-row case shows power of social media

Ga. death-row case shows power of social media

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