Rogelio Reyes Cannady is scheduled for execution in Texas on November 19. He is one of three people scheduled to be executed in Texas next week. The Sun in Toronto reports that

Texas officials presented Rogelio Reyes Cannady, 36, with his execution date on Aug. 22. Since then he has been hand writing the daily diary he mails to a friend, who posts it onto the blog, giving the world a rare glimpse into the life of a condemned man.

That friend, Juan Palomo, has visited him on Death Row at least 30 times. During those meetings, “At various points he has expressed remorse … about the way he lived his life, about the deaths of those two young people and the heartache it brought to their families and his family,” Palomo said.

Palomo explains on the blog “Death Watch Journal” how the blog works:

Rogelio writes his journal longhand, in pencil and sends them to me each week. I will post them as soon as possible after I receive them. I welcome your thoughts and will share with him those I believe he will be interested in reading.

I have been corresponding with Rogelio since 1999 and I have visited him periodically since April, 2000. Our last visit was August 30.

Here is an excerpt from Rogelio’s entry from Oct 24:

Late night now. Catching up on last letters, most of the day. I really don’t know how things are going to happen and days are growing shorter, it seems. All you who have written: I may not answer properly unless I get a stay of execution. My stamps and envelopes were on short supply and now gone. Still, they won’t budge on returning my stamps and envelopes. So I have to figure out another way. I am weeks away from my execution and the reason they took my stuff is a joke: they were not marked with my name and number. All of you are in my thoughts and in my heart

Click here to Join the Abolish the Death Penalty Project on Amazee.com and help us win the membership contest. We could win up to $5,000 to use against the death penalty. The project with the most members by Jan 22 wins. We plan to use one-half of any prize money we win to help needy families of people on death row travel to visit their loved ones on death row. We will use the other half of the prize money to fight against the death penalty.

You have to go to the project page, click on “join project” on the right hand side, then click on “register”. Then to qualify as one of the members who count towards the contest, you have to upload a profile picture or avatar of yourself. You don’t have to do anything else to help us win the membership contest, but if you want, you can contribute content to the project.

One week after the first African-American was elected President of the United States, two African-Americans are set to be executed in Texas this week. 40 percent of the people on death row in Texas are black, although blacks comprise only 11.9 percent of the Texas population. According to the TDCJ website, of the thirteen executions starting with the last one, Elkie Taylor, until March 11, 2009, all the people scheduled for execution in Texas are either African-American (8) or Hispanic (5).

For more information on the issue of race and the death penalty, visit this page at the Death Penalty Information Center.

George Whitaker III Nov 12
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously voted Monday to turn down George Whitaker’s request for a reprieve. The board dismissed Whitaker’s appeal in which he argued that jurors should have been told that he only would be eligible for parole after he served 40 years in prison.

Denard Manns Nov 13
Manns is one of two executions scheduled for this week. If both go through, Manns will be the 17th death-row inmate executed in Texas this year. Last year Texas had 26 executions.

To send the Governor of Texas an email denouncing these executions, go to:
http://governor.state.tx.us/contact

You can also call and leave him a voice message:

Telephone numbers for Governor Rick Perry of Texas

* Citizen’s Opinion Hotline [for Texas callers] :
(800) 252-9600
* Information and Referral and Opinion Hotline [for Austin, Texas and out-of-state callers] :
(512) 463-1782
* Office of the Governor Main Switchboard [office hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST] :
(512) 463-2000
* Citizen’s Assistance Telecommunications Device
If you are using a telecommunication device for the deaf (TDD),
call 711 to reach Relay Texas

* Office of the Governor Fax:
(512) 463-1849

Mailing Address

Office of the Governor
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428

Huntsville – Corner of 12th Street and Avenue I (in front of the Walls Unit) at 5:00 p.m.

Austin – At the Texas Capitol on the sidewalk on 11th Street facing Congress Avenue from 5:30 to 6:30 PM.

Beaumont – Diocese of Beaumont, Diocesan Pastoral Office, 703 Archie St. @ 4:00 p.m. on the day of an execution.

College Station – 6 to 7 PM on execution days, corner of Texas Avenue and University Drive.

Corpus Christi – at 6 PM in front of Incarnate Word Convent at 2910 Alameda Street

Dallas – 5:30 pm, at the SMU Women’s Center, 3116 Fondren Drive

Houston – To learn location or if a stay has been granted before you come out, call Burnham Terrell, 713/921-0948.

Lewisville – St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church, 1897 W. Main Street. Peace & Justice Ministry conducts Vigils of Witness Against Capital Punishment at 6:00 pm on the day executions are scheduled in Texas.

McKinney – St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Community located at 110 St. Gabriel Way. We gather the last Sunday of the month, following the 11:00 Mass to pray for those men/women scheduled to be executed in the next month and to remember the victims, their families, and all lives touched, including us as a society.

San Antonio (Site 1) – Archdiocese of San Antonio, in the St. Joseph Chapel at the Chancery, 2718 W. Woodlawn Ave. (1 mile east of Bandera Rd.) at 11:30 a.m. on the day of execution. Broadcast on Catholic Television of San Antonio (Time-Warner cable channel 15) at 12:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on the day of execution.

San Antonio (Site 2) – Main Plaza across from Bexar County Courthouse and San Fernando Cathedral – Noon

Spring – Prayer Vigil at 6 PM on evenings of executions at St Edward Catholic Community, 2601 Spring Stuebner Rd for the murder victim, for family and friends of the murder victim, the prison guards and correctional officers, for the family of the condemn man/woman, for the man/woman to be executed and to an end to the death penalty.

HURRICANE SEASON: the hidden messages in water is a two woman show about unnatural disaster and a great shift in universal consciousness. Read more about this inspiring show at the show’s website: www.hurricaneseasontour.com.

Texas Moratorium Network will participate in a dialogue at the Austin show. The running time of the show is 2 hours. During the intermission between the first act and finale, representatives of TMN and other groups will be invited to come forward. Sallome Hralima, a powerful solutionary who has training and experience in transformational dialog, will be facilitating the ciphers.

Alixa and Naima are the soul-sister co-conspiracy of arts activists known as Climbing PoeTree. With roots in Haiti and Colombia, Alixa and Naima reside in Brooklyn and track footprints across the country and globe on a mission to overcome destruction with creativity.

AUSTIN the Off Center
11.19.08 | 6:30 PM
Austin, TX
The Off Center
2211 Hidalgo St
Austin, TX 78702
(512) 476-7833

doors open (6:30)
show time (7:00)

Ticket Info: 10- 20 dollar sliding scale.

Hurricane Season is a post-Katrina performance uprising: a multi-media show and movement strategy that draws vital connections between shared struggles and common solutions in a critical moment in national and global history.

New Orleans emerged from the floodwaters as a microcosm of the intersecting forces at play across the world:

– global warming and environmental injustice
– extreme poverty amidst affluence and over-consumption
– gentrification and forced relocation of poor people and people of color
– the police, prison, and military industrial complex
– corporate control over public policy
– lack of local ownership and self-determination
– gross disparity of access and power along gender, sexuality, class, and color lines

Through a tapestry of spoken-word poetry, theater, video projection, dance, shadow art, and a sound collage of personal testimonies, Hurricane Season connects the issues that surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the “unnatural disasters” disenfranchised communities are experiencing nationwide on a daily basis.

Popular education through cultural activism,
the performance brims with stories missing or mangled in mainstream media. The show is both brutal and uplifting, taking the audience on a voyage of unthinkable tragedy and undeniable promise from the eye of a systemic storm.

With a set built of bamboo,calabash, and water that surrounds the audience in a circle of shadow and light, Hurricane Season transforms spaces into sanctuaries of healing, witness, and imagination.

Every show is followed by a “solutions-cipher,” a forum that addresses the impacts of the issues surfaced in Hurricane Season on a local level, and illuminates solutions already underway. The objective of the post-show “solutions-ciphers” is to cross-pollinate creative strategies for self-determination and to turn the passion generated in the show into action manifested in the community.

Representatives from grassroots groups doing critical and inspiring work in every tour stop, will be featured at the dialogs to garner support for their initiatives and give audience members access into local movements.

Texas Moratorium Network will participate in the post-show dialogue at the Austin show. TMN is a grassroots organization that struggles against the death penalty in the number one execution state in the U.S.

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.