was the call of thousands in Savannah, Georgia, right until the moment Troy Davis was executed by lethal injection on September 21st, 2011 despite serious doubts concerning his guilt.

Troy Davis was an African American man convicted of fatally shooting an off-duty officer in 1991 purely on eye-witness accounts. There was no physical evidence. No murder weapon was found. No DNA was tested. Davis demanded a polygraph test before his execution but was denied. Yet, seven out of those nine eye witnesses have either fully or partially recanted on the very statements that led to Davis’s sentencing.

As the thousands shouted, thousands of tweets circulated in the twittersphere. Here’s how Andrew O’Hagan describes it in the New York Review of Books:

Desmond Tutu got involved. So did Pope Benedict. But it was the millions of Twitter users who seemed most powerfully in attendance during Davis’s last hours. They talked to each other and to the world at the same time, finding solace, but also comrades-in-arms. Twitter is marvellous in the way a school playground is marvellous: full of life, full of information, and heaving with bullies. In the hour before the Georgia authorities murdered Davis, the mob were baying for morality, but also for the blood of lethal injection aficionados like Ann Coulter, now known as a ‘politicunt’, which isn’t too harsh for someone who says that ‘there is more credible evidence that space aliens have walked among us than that an innocent person has been executed in this country in the past 60 years.’

Fortunately, the bullies on twitter only get 140 characters like the rest of us – unlike the bullies who murdered Troy Davis: they get vials of heart-stopping poison.

See this Guardian article/video for more information.