Throughout Tuesday and into the evening, when a few hundred people gathered at the Capitol downtown, people spoke again and again of how Mr. Davis was wrongly accused, wrongly convicted and now, in their minds, about to be wrongly executed by a legal system stacked against minorities.
A wrongly executed one becomes a judicial tragedy.
"Or perhaps if someone were wrongly executed?" Mr. Letterman said.
But, wrongly executed, they also risk upsetting it in ways their most evangelical supporters seem unwilling to admit.
One campaign won a posthumous pardon for a wrongly executed man and freedom for a number of other men serving life sentences for murders they did not commit.
He did not offer any reason to believe that Mr. Johnson was wrongly executed but said he simply wanted to more thoroughly examine the case.
This is a shocking example of how inadequate legal representation sends poor people to death row, where some are no doubt wrongly executed.
A fierce opponent of capital punishment, he readily accepted the role of serial killer John Christie in 10 Rillington Place (1971), in which he gave a chilling performance equalled by that of John Hurt as the wrongly executed Timothy Evans.
His most famous books dealt with unjust prosecutions, among them 10 Rillington Place (1961; filmed 1971), which led to the posthumous exoneration of a wrongly executed man, and Thirty-six Murders and Two Immoral Earnings (2002).
They won postponements from federal judges, who ruled that the risk of being wrongly executed without a proper hearing outweighed such deadlines, particularly when the prisoners were unaware of the deadlines and could not prepare their own appeals.
