Contact: Wende Gozan Brown at 347-526-5520, [email protected]
Erika Laws at 410-336-7879, [email protected]
Joi Ridley at 410-409-1219, [email protected]
(Atlanta) – On Thursday, September 15, at 10:30 a.m., leadership from the NAACP and Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) will deliver hundreds of thousands of petition signatures calling for clemency for Troy Anthony Davis, scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday, September 21st. A brief press conference will immediately follow the petition drop at the Sloppy Floyd Administration Building, 2 Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive, SE, Atlanta, GA 30334.
The petition signatures, tens of thousands of which are from Georgians, have been collected by AIUSA, NAACP, Color of Change, ACLU and Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. They will be delivered by Laura Moye, director of AIUSA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign, and Edward DuBose, Georgia state conference president of the NAACP. In addition to the petition signatures several letters will be hand-delivered to the board:
· A letter signed by 3,218 religious leaders, the most signatures to date on a letter asking for clemency in a death row case. It will be delivered by Steve Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, and the Rev. Gary Charles, Senior Pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta;
· A letter signed by 26 death row exonerees and delivered by Gary Drinkard, who was released after six years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit;
· A legal professionals letter with 1,494 signatures, delivered by Anne Emanuel, Georgia State University School of Law professor and the team chair of the ABA’s Georgia death penalty assessment;
· A letter of support signed by 110 murder victim family members, delivered by John Starbuck, the son of a murdered police officer who lives in Atlanta.
Copies of all letters will be made available to the press after the delivery drop and can be found on www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis.
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