I disagree with you. Many people in similar situations would have done the same thing that she did. She was a Christian, and was asked to convert to Islam. She refused to change her religion. I have respect for her.
I am an atheist or agnost. If someone ask me to change my religion, I'd also tell him to GTFO. Would that make me a martyr?
It's a terrible, threatening precedent, sure. I'm sympathetic toward the cause of being able to believe as you please without your government killing you for it. The individual woman, though - not really. I'll troll so far as to say the ideal outcome of this would be the state following through with the execution, followed by the closet Christian population rising in arms against the government, bringing global fundie numbers way down. Doesn't matter who wins so long as everyone fighting fights for boogeymen.
You know, though, I think there's an angle missing in a lot of these stories -- like who the woman actually is and why I should care about her death, or the death of everyone in Southern Sudan for that matter. Yeah, she's human, just like Hitler, so what? It's always about the state and their actions, their thought processes and laws, then the response of unrelateds. If my bud Jimbo Ayzaqyyola (I call him Allah for short) were tried and sentenced with the same results (but reverse which religious fanatics are in power) in Canada, I'd defend him, because Jimbo's a cool guy - came over for a minor plumbing issue, then freely helped me disassemble and learn about my water softener because he likes eradicating ignorance - and because he's an enjoyable, helpful fellow who did no wrong by me, shouldn't be killed, and should probably be killed for in defense of. That, I think, is a rational reason for an uprising - the "they're killing him because he disrespected Jesus" thing is secondary and frankly unimportant: it doesn't really matter why they're going to kill Jimbo if I'm reasonably sure Jimbo's a fine fellow. Maybe he catches his maid stealing from him and cuts off her hands and uses them to replace his front door knockers -- well, I'd still have to say Jimbo shouldn't go to prison because Jimbo's in my mental trust club and the laws can go fuck themselves.
This is why I don't think all these massive, consolidated governments work -- we dump the community trust thing and start insisting we need to define absolutely every "bad" action in a 200,000 page law book nobody could possibly read in its entirety before dying - they're hard as Hell to understand and frequently misinterpreted or incorrectly applied, while punishment severity seems to be assigned randomly to crimes, where possessing LSD ends up being declared worse than double homicide. It's a junk system coming out of utopian minds where a government can govern 200,000+ people and do a better job at it than a judicial system made up entirely of 100 lightly-armed guys who walk around threatening to kill people when they do something obnoxious and sometimes pulling the trigger. And it's a double-solution there, because then these odd men who aspire to shoot and protect won't kill homeless loiterers for entertainment. ..... What're we talking about?