Lynched in 1915, Exonerate Leo Frank!

One hundred years ago, this August, Governor Slaton commuted the death sentence of Leo Frank, a New York Jewish businessman. Leo Frank was the supervisor of an Atlanta pencil factory where Mary Phagan, a young girl, had been found murdered in April 1913. From the start, the Atlanta Police bungled the investigation. They arrested a half dozen suspects and then released all of them. The police ultimately arrested Frank and he was subsequently convicted on false testimony, given on the stand by many suspect to be the real murderer, Jim Conley.
Frank's trial, from beginning to end, was a legal farce. Witnesses were coerced to say they had seen Leo Frank with the girl that day. Then many of those witnesses later recanted their story. The forensic evidence had been "cooked". The jury was instructed that the girl's hair and blood had been found next to Frank's office. They were never told that the hair and blood did not actually match the victim's. Jim Conley, lied on the stand, changed his testimony three times, and later admitted to others that he had been "the one who had killed that girl".
Convinced that the entire trial had been a sham, Governor Slaton mounted an independent investigation of the crime. Slaton's conclusion was inescapable; Frank had been falsely accused and then wrongly convicted. Faced with a terrible backlash from Atlantans who hated Frank, Slayton commuted the sentence from capital punishment to life imprisonment. Even that modest attempt to re-write an old wrong brought murderous condemnation from Atlantans. The warden of the prison willingly gave Frank to a lynch mob in an act that writer Steve Oney calls "state sponsored terrorism". The lynch party was planned and orchestrated by a former Georgia governor, two Georgia state representatives and various judges. The next morning Leo Frank was lynched.
Given past wrong doings, encourage our local commissioners to take a stand for justice 100 years later and clear the name of Leo Frank. Please help us write the final chapter in Leo Franks story and to celebrate what is good about the South, Georgia and more specifically Marietta.