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The governor did not pardon Leo Frank. He was going to commute his death sentence to life in prison, because the evidence against him was thin, and in reaction, he was lynched. We’ve been through this.

Leo Frank Case

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/leo-frank-case

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The Governor’s Decision
When
Leo Frank Marker
Leo Frank Marker
all the court appeals had been exhausted, Frank’s attorneys sought a commutation from Georgia governor John M. Slaton. Thomas E. Watson, a former Populist and the publisher of the Jeffersonian, had conducted a campaign denouncing Frank that struck a chord, and Georgians responded to it. Watson’s accusations against Jews and Leo Frank, in particular, increased the paper’s sales and elicited enormous numbers of letters praising him and his publication. As Watson continued to fan the flames of public outrage, his readership grew. By the time Slaton reviewed the case, there was tremendous pressure from the public to let the courts’ verdicts stand.
Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents, visited the pencil factory where the murder had taken place, and finally decided that Frank was innocent. He commuted the sentence, however, to life imprisonment, assuming that Frank’s innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free.
Slaton’s decision enraged much of the Georgia populace, leading to riots throughout Atlanta, as well as a march to the governor’s mansion by some of his more virulent opponents. The governor declared martial law and called out the National Guard. When Slaton’s term as governor ended a few days later, police escorted him to the railroad station, where he and his wife boarded a train and left the state, not to return for a decade.
The Lynching
After Slaton’s commutation, Frank was interned at a prison farm in Milledgeville for just under two months. During his internment, a fellow prisoner slashed Frank’s throat with a knife, though he survived. Frank’s stay at the prison farm was cut short on the night of August 16, 1915, when twenty-five prominent citizens of Marietta, identifying themselves as the Knights of Mary Phagan, caravanned to Milledgeville, took Frank from his cell, and drove him back to Marietta, Phagan’s hometown, where they hanged him from an oak tree. Only months later, many of these same men would take part in the nighttime ceremony at Stone Mountain that established the modern Ku Klux Klan.
A crowd of nearly three thousand people gathered the next morning in Marietta to view Frank’s hanging body. The crowd grew increasingly unruly, and undertakers had to wrestle Frank’s body away before it could be further battered.