Congrats to New Jersey and the many people working there with New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP). They just succeeded in convincing a New Jersey Senate committee to approve a bill to abolish the death penalty in New Jersey.

This news goes to show what can happen when a state has a competent full-time person working to stop executions, or more than one such person, as they have in New Jersey. Last year, the most important major national foundation that funds anti-death penalty work in the U.S. had a chance to provide a coalition of Texas organizations with $50,000 to work against the death penalty, but they chose to send the money instead to other states, including $50,000 to Wisconsin, which has not had the death penalty since the mid 1800’s, yes 1800’s. It is good to fund anti-death penalty work in states where there have been no executions, but it is not morally defensible to give no funds to the one state where the most executions take place and where at least three innocent people have been executed, Ruben Cantu, Cameron Willingham and Carlos De Luna. For every dollar spent in other states against the death penalty, ten percent should be sent to Texas to help us stop executions in the number one death penalty state.

Ten Percent for Texas.

More from New Jersey:

Legislation to abolish New Jersey’s 24-year-old, never-used death penalty and replace it with life without possibility of parole was approved today by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

By a vote of 8-2, the committee approved the bill and sent it to the full Senate, where the committee chairman, Sen. John Adler (D-Camden), predicted it would pass.

If also passed by the Assembly and signed by Gov. Jon Corzine, who opposes capital punishment, it would make New Jersey the first state to legislatively abolish capital punishment since 1976. That was the year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the first revised death penalty laws after striking them down nationwide four years earlier.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Jose Angel Moreno won a stay today, hours before his scheduled execution for the abduction and fatal shooting of a San Antonio college student more than two decades ago.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered further review of mitigating evidence on a 5-3 vote.

His attorneys argued that Moreno’s jury was unable to consider evidence of a troubled childhood and other mitigating issues that could have influenced them to give Moreno a life sentence instead of death.

The appeal was based on a Supreme Court decision two weeks ago in three other Texas cases where justices ruled instructions to jurors were improper, attorney Scott Sullivan said.

The court had voted 4-4 on the appeal Wednesday night, with one judge abstaining, meaning the request to stop the execution was “neither granted nor denied,” Sullivan said. He asked the court to reconsider, and the request was granted today.

Next week, Charles Smith, 41, is scheduled be executed in Texas.

One thing that jumps out at you if read through the information on the TDCJ website about people on death row, including both the still living and the already executed, is how many have a very low level of formal education. 8th grade seems to be a frequent educational end point for a lot of people who end up on death row.

Today, Texas is set to execute another 8th grade dropout, Jose Moreno.

Moreno, 39, would be the 14th Texas inmate executed this year in the nation’s busiest death penalty state. Another inmate is set to die next week.

The U.S. Supreme Court in January refused to review Moreno’s case.

His lawyers continued trying to block the execution, arguing in appeals that Moreno’s jury was unable to consider evidence of a troubled childhood and other mitigating issues that could have influenced them to give Moreno a life sentence instead of death. The appeal was based on a Supreme Court decision two weeks ago in three other Texas cases where justices ruled instructions to jurors were improper, attorney Scott Sullivan said.

In an unusual outcome, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 4-4 on the appeal, with one judge abstaining, meaning the request to stop the execution was “neither granted nor denied,” Sullivan said.

“All of our energies now are centered on the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said at midday Thursday. “We may have a decent chance.”

Moreno, who dropped out of school after the eighth grade and who had a history of drug and alcohol use, declined to speak with reporters in the weeks preceding his scheduled punishment.

Moreno will be the 393rd person to be executed in Texas since 1982.

Write Gov Perry to Protest the Execution of Jose Moreno

Texas is not the only place where innocent people end up on death row and some are even executed as were Ruben Cantu, Cameron Willingham and Carlos De Luna. CNN has the story of an innocent woman on death row in Iraq.

Sitting on Iraq’s death row is a 25-year-old woman convicted in the slayings of three relatives. She says her husband carried out the killings and fled. She confessed to being an accomplice, she says, only after being tortured in police custody.

Despite lingering questions about the case, the fate of Samar Saed Abdullah remains the gallows.

“I am innocent,” she told CNN from inside the al-Kadhimiya Women’s Prison in Baghdad. “The judge did not hear me out. He refused to hear anything I have to say. He just sentenced me.” (Watch Abdullah cry as she tells her story )

According to Amnesty International, such claims are not uncommon in Iraq, which has the fourth-highest execution rate in the world.

Amnesty issued a report last month that concluded sentences in Iraq increasingly follow flawed trials and coerced confessions.

“In many cases, death sentences have been issued following proceedings which failed to meet international fair trial standards,” the report said. “This represents a profoundly retrograde step.”

Speaking of women on death row. Next month, Texas is scheduled to execute a woman named Cathy Henderson. Write Governor Perry asking him to stop the execution of Henderson.