Activists including a mother of the online organizing movement will be outside the downtown Oakland office of state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, today demanding a floor vote on AB 706, a bill that would ban toxic flame retardants from furniture and bedding effective Jan. 1, 2010 while updating fire-safety standards.

Speakers at the noon rally outside the state office building at 1515 Clay St. will include Joan Blades of Berkeley, co-founder of online political organizing powerhouse MoveOn.org as well as the founder of MomsRising; and Mary Brune of Alameda, founder of Making Our Milk Safe (MOMS).

The activists say brominated and chlorinated flame retardants have been linked to health effects including reproductive and neurological problems, endocrine disruption, and cancer; elevated rates of certain cancers among firefighters are believed to be a result of chemical exposure from smoke and soot created when these products burn. Thus far, AB 706 is being held in the Senate Appropriations Committee; if it doesn’t get out by Tuesday, it’ll be done for in this Legislative session. Environmentalists and firefighters are pretty solidly behind it; industry groups, not so much.

But some observers, including Beyond Chron and the Los Angeles Times, believe the bill actually is doomed because it was introduced by Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who happens to be running to unseat state Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco. The LA Times listed AB 706 among its “must pass” bills… but will old-fashioned electoral politics get in the way?

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice — a 15-member panel created in 2004 to studying the state’s past failures leading to wrongful convictions or death sentences — is rallying support for a trio of bills that’ll be heard Tuesday by the state Senate Public Safety Committee addressing false confessions, false informant testimony and mistaken eyewitness identifications.

Commission chairman John Van de Kamp, a two-term former state Attorney General and 1990 Democratic gubernatorial primary candidate, says the bills “will protect the police, defendants, victims and the state of California from wrongful convictions.”

SB 756, authored by Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, D-Leimert Park, would require the Attorney General to develop new guidelines for conducting suspect line-ups, including using “fillers” who are similar in appearance to the suspect as well as separating multiple witnesses. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill by Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, last year; Ridley-Thomas reintroduced it after tweaking it to meet concerns expressed in the governor’s veto message.

SB 511, authored by Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, would require electronic recording of police interrogations in order to help put an end to coerced confessions. “California would not be the first state to enact this critical legislation and in fact Santa Clara County has implemented these reforms successfully for years,” Alquist said in a news release. Again, Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill last year, and Alquist reintroduced it after tweaking it based on the veto message.

SB 609, authored by Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, would seek to curb false testimony by jailhouse informants — who have strong motivation to lie in return for lenience — by requiring corroborating evidence for all such testimony.

Appearing at tomorrow’s hearing will be Timothy Atkins of Los Angeles, who spent 20 years in state prison after being wrongfully convicted — based on mistaken eyewitness testimony and false informant testimony — of second degree murder and two counts of robbery; he has been exonerated, and went free in February. Also present will be Harold Hall of Los Angeles, who spent 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit as a result of a false confession and jailhouse informant testimony, and Arthur Carmona of Garden Grove, who was 16 years old when wrongfully convicted based on mistaken eyewitness identification.