During the recent moratorium on executions, several notable things happened. Three states - California, North Carolina and Tennessee - launched studies of their death penalty systems. Two states, Maryland and Nebraska, debated abolishing the death penalty in their state legislatures. A third state, New Jersey, did away with capital punishment altogether. For the first time in Texas, Rick Reed, a candidate for the Travis County district attorney's office, ran on a platform opposing capital punishment.

The Missoulian just published a great article on the Students for Economic and Social Justice, a student group at the University of Montana (UM) that has received a Campus Progress Action Grant for several years in a row for its anti-sweatshop campaign. 

The group has already convinced the UM to join the Worker Rights Consortium, and is currently attempting to get their campus to join the Designated Suppliers Program. After running into an impasse in negotiations with the UM administration, they occupied the college president’s office.

Here is an excerpt of the Missoulian article: 

Eight of the students involved with the sit-in were arrested and later given three-day suspensions for trespassing and violating the campus student conduct code.

While their activities raised the ire of campus officials, the UM group also garnered national accolades.

Earlier this month, the group was notified it had been awarded the Action Campaign of the Year by Campus Progress, an arm of the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based nonpartisan progressive organization. […]

“We were all pretty pleased to get that sort of validation,” Newman said. “Not only for our work but for the cause in general. There are lots of schools working on these issues. The more attention we can bring to them is all the better.”