Monday was the first day for Texas legislators to pre-file bills for the legislative session that runs from Jan to May. Seven bills were filed on the first day. The first bill on the list, HB 111, grew out of the case of Kenneth Foster, Jr., who was tried together with a co-defendant. When Gov Perry commuted Foster’s sentence in 1987, he said he was concerned that Foster had not had a separate trial. Chair of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Aaron Pena’s HB 111 says, “the court may not join two or more defendants in the same criminal trial if any defendant to be tried is indicted or complained against for a capital felony, and the court shall order a severance as to any two or more defendants who are jointly indicted or complained against for a capital felony”.

If you want to see a list of bills filed dealing with capital punishment, click here.

Anyone interested in using online activism against the death penalty should take a look at the new book, CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World. It is about using online activism to change the world. The author, Tom Watson, also has a blog that is worth a look. He says that Obama’s election was “the product of the most socially-wired campaign in American history. In a victory that holds deep lessons for how nonprofit organizations and cause-driven ventures will organize volunteers and build support in the future, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States Tuesday in a near-landslide victory keyed by state-of-the-art social networking and online organizing.”

The website SocialActions is also a great place to find useful social activism services. It has a guide to 30 website platforms that can be used for online activism. Another source is MobileActive.org, which concentrates on using cell phones for social change.

If you run an anti-death penalty website, you might take a look at some of the online services that TMN uses and implement them on your own sites.

TMN was an early adopter of online activism from our start back in 2000. Our first website, created using phpWebSite, allowed us to make blog posts long before the word “blog” became popular. We have sinced starting using Blogger as our main blog while keeping our main website at texasmoratorium.org. In addition to our own blog, we reach a larger audience by posting occasionally about death penalty issues on other community blog sites, such as DailyKos and Burnt Orange Report.

Every anti-death penalty organization can share news and action alerts on each others websites by creating a news feed using a service such as Google Reader. Then you include the RSS feeds from other anti-death penalty organizations. You can see an example on the right of our blog and main website. Capital Defense Weekly is a site that uses RSS feeds very well.

We have used Joomla to create websites such as SharonKiller.com and deathpenaltyartshow.org, among others. The TMN PAC website uses WordPress. Our main website still uses phpWebSite, but we want to transition to another content management system soon.

You can also find TMN on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Change.org or read our blog. We feed our blog automatically to Twitter using TwitterFeed. Our Twitter account also is fed action alerts dealing with the death penalty from the SocialActions website, so it should pick up alerts from other anti-death penalty organizations.

Gloria Rubac of the The Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement informs us by email that visits will resume on Wednesday at Polunsky.

From Gloria:

The lockdown ends on Wednesday.

Just called again to clarify and was told that visits start Wednesday. Of course, on Wednesday it is press day so visits are only in the morning, from 8-12 noon.

Thanks to all who helped put the pressure on Texas officials to end this ridiculous lockdown. The Abolition Movement will continue to work around the isolation and mind-destroying conditions on Texas’ death row.

Statement from the support group for Reginald Blanton:

This petition is to bring awareness to the wrongful conviction of Reginald Blanton, Texas death row inmate. Reginald was railroaded to Texas death row for a crime he did not commit.

The trial was shoddy, and false testimony was used to get a conviction. Other factors in the trial include, prosecutorial misconduct, perjured testimony, ineffective assistance of counsel, mitigating evidence, insufficient investigation and actual innocence.

Reginald’s court appointed lawyer did not try his best to help Reginald. He did not have a jury of his peers, there was no eyewitness and no murder weapon was found. Because of his street gang affiliation, Reginald was “guilty” before he ever went to trial. There was reasonable doubt, and this alone should have thrown out his guilty verdict.

We the undersigned are asking that this case be looked over, and a new trial be presented to assure that he receives justice.

More information and facts can be read on this site, created for this case.

We created a petition to urge President-elect Obama to “stop all federal executions and place a moratorium on federal prosecutions that seek the death penalty pending an independent study of the death penalty system that examines racial disparities, prejudicial errors, adequacy of legal representation, and other inequities in capital prosecutions”.

Sign the petition here.

You can also send him an email on his transition website.

Read our previous post on this topic, “Obama Administration Urged to Stay All Federal Executions and Impose Moratorium on Death Penalty“