Michael Moore has attempted to pull his new memoir Here Comes Trouble from every bookshop in the state of Georgia following the execution of Troy Davis last week.
The film-maker posted a statement on his website in which he said that he would ask his publisher to remove the book – published earlier this month – from shops in Georgia, "and if they won't do that I will donate every dime of every royalty my book makes in Georgia to help defeat the racists and killers who run that state".
Moore also called for a general boycott of the state. "I encourage everyone I know to never travel to Georgia, never buy anything made in Georgia, to never do business in Georgia," wrote Moore. "I ask all Americans with a conscience to shun anything and everything to do with the murderous state of Georgia."
Davis, who maintained his innocence over the shooting of a police officer in Savannah in 1989, was killed by lethal injection in Jackson, Georgia last Wednesday despite serious doubts about his guilt.
Georgian authorities seemed unmoved by Moore's threat, with a spokesman for governor Nathan Deal telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that "we think it's cute that he thinks anyone in Georgia would buy his book, but if any Georgian does, I'm happy to double the royalties and buy a pack of gum for a charity of Michael Moore's choice".
Moore later told Keith Olbermann's US television show that his American publisher Grand Central had not been able to pull the books from Georgia, so instead he is planning to donate money to criminal justice reform organisation the Innocence Project.
"I just got word before we came on the air. I asked my publisher this morning, 'I want you to stop shipping my book to Georgia. I want you to pull the books out of there. I don't want a dime being made. I don't want to make a dime off of that state until that state acts to change things.' And they just told me that they can't. They can't recall the books," he said. "So I am going to go to the next step then. I'm going to write a big cheque to the Innocence Project, who have gotten hundreds of people exonerated who were sitting in prisons. And since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, well over 100 people who were on death row, who we were going to execute, we have then discovered they were falsely convicted, and they were set free. Well, they almost died - this Innocence Project is a great organisation."
Moore said he was also planning to fund voter drives in Georgia "to register our fellow Americans who are African-Americans, so that they have a chance to have their voice heard … there's 600,000 African-Americans in the last election that were not registered to vote".
"This has got to be stopped," he added. "We are a civilised nation, and yet we do not join the other civilised nations of this planet when we do things like this."
