It came as a shock. Here we were in the office, having just returned from setting up a tent in preparation for a vigil during the execution of Sedley Alley, and all of a sudden the Governor issued a reprieve. True a temporary reprieve, true he didn't release physical evidence for DNA testing, but a reprieve nonetheless. Sedley Alley would not be killed by the state that night.

Now, I'd love to believe that the Governor did so because he was moved by idea of extinguishing a human life. I'd like to believe that his sense of justice overrode all political considerations and compelled him to issue the reprieve, but even I am not that naive.

So what did it?

Well, I've gotta say that a part of the reason is that it became politically dangerous for him not to. We successfully mobilized enough people to shape public opinion toward favoring a stay. Clearly that's something we'd like to do more often (if we have to have execution dates set at all), so we want to know how we did it.

A large part is finding the right message, in this case, the fact that there was DNA evidence that had never been tested. But a greater question was how did we mobilize around that message. One of the best tools that we added to our arsenal for this execution was phonebanking. The Sunday before the execution we made calls to well over 1000 people all around the state asking them to call the Governor, and, lo and behold, he had hundreds of messages on his machine when he came into work on Monday morning, and lo and behold again, the next evening he issued the reprieve.

So what made our calls so effective? How did we do it? First, we had a collection of terrific volunteers willing to sacrifice their Sunday evening to make calls. It's impossible to overstate how important these people are to our efforts. Second we developed a tight phone script that each caller had, so even people who don't feel to comfortable speaking about a case could participate; all they had to do was read. And third, a crucial part of that phone script was a concrete and simple ask to the people receiving the calls: "Please, when we hang up, call the Governor and tell him to stay the execution and release the physical evidence for DNA testing." The ask is simple, we gave people the phone number and told them what to say, easy for them to accomplish, they were probably going to get an answering machine so they could just read the message, and immediate, witness "please do it right when we hang up" and the fact that the execution was 48 hours away. These factors, directness, ease, and immediacy, make a good ask, and generated a lot of calls.

There are two other, institutional concerns that really benefited us. The first was a long term commitment to building our database, so when we went to make calls we had hundreds and hundreds of supporters all around the state that we could contact and activate. The second was a relationship with the Nashville Peace and Justice Center. The NPJC has five phone lines which they generously allowed us to use to make calls. Even better would be for organizations to find a Union Local that has a legitimate phone bank and build a relationship with them.

Bringing all of these factors together allowed us to leverage a significant mass of voters to apply pressure to the Governor (or any other political official) when the need arose. We'll continue to build our database and cultivate the volunteers that make it all possible as we head toward the day when it will never be needed again.