"Bucking the trend"?

USA Today reported the other day ("Wider Death Penalty Sought") that "[a]t least a half-dozen states are considering broadening the death penalty, countering a national trend toward scaling back its use."  I wonder, though -- does the "bucking the trend" claim rely on an apples-and-oranges comparison? 

On the one hand, several states' legislatures are, it appears, expanding (slightly) the reach of their death-penalty laws (Texas and Tennessee, for example, are considering proposals to "include certain child molesters who did not murder their victims").  On the other, we have some executive moratoria, and several courts have stopped executions until arguments about the lethal-injection process are resolved. 

Maybe this is getting too nit-picky, but I am not sure I see a conflict between (a) enlarging the set of crimes for which death is a legally authorized and (according to the legislature) morally permissible punishment (I'm putting aside questions about whether the expansion is constitutionally permissible), and (b) halting executions -- temporarily -- while certain procedural problems are addressed and remedied.

Also, I wonder -- how would / should these legislative proposals factor into the Court's Atkins / Roper / "evolving standards" analysis?