Rick Halperin publishes a regularly updated page with information about recent death penalty news. He has been doing this since 1998 and the full archives are also available.
Current News -http://people.smu.edu/rhalperi/
Archive -http://www.soci.niu.edu/~archives/ABOLISH/rick.html
About the Legislation:
On November 5, 2003, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Innocence Protection Act, which is included in a larger bill called the Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act of 2003 (HR 3214/S 1700). This measure would provide an infusion of federal funds to eliminate the current backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples in the nation's crime labs and to improve the capacity of federal, state and local crime labs to conduct DNA analyses.