This disparity between counties in seeking capital punishment is just one of the issues being debated as state lawmakers consider rewriting and reinstating the state's death penalty, knocked down by the state's top court in June.

On Tuesday, a panel of state Assembly members heard hours of testimony during a hearing on the issue at the Legislative Office Building that drew a standing-room-only crowd. Those in attendance included members of the clergy, parents of murder victims, professors, prosecutors, and even wrongly convicted men.

The debate over the law has shifted from the morality of killing New York's worst criminals to include other issues: the fairness, the cost and the need.

"We urge you to embrace a culture of life and not a culture of death," said Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard, speaking for the state Catholic Conference.

"What we are saying is that there are ways short of taking life that society should choose," Hubbard said, drawing sustained applause from the 250 or so people crammed into a hearing room.

Hubbard was one of 38 people scheduled to testify who oppose the death penalty. Only four proponents were slated to speak.

Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, who won one of the state's seven successful death penalty cases since the law was passed in 1995, spoke as a death penalty supporter. But he was critical of one aspect of the law as written because he said it allows inconsistencies.

"There are no guidelines," he said. "You didn't give us any guidelines."

Fitzpatrick and the state's 61 other district attorneys have total discretion over which cases they seek the death penalty in. The 1995 law gave no clear guidelines on what cases should be tried as capital murders, and some district attorneys are more likely to seek death than others, he said.

Fitzpatrick's case against James Cahill, who poisoned his estranged wife with cyanide as she was recovering in a Syracuse hospital from his attack on her with a baseball bat, was an example of why the district attorney believes New York should bring the death penalty back.

"Do I think in my heart what James Cahill did merited the death penalty? -- yes," he told the panel, adding that capital punishment can be a deterrent to crime.

"Of course it is," Fitzpatrick continued. "James Cahill didn't think he was going to get caught."

But opponents said the costs of lengthy appeals should discourage the reinstatement of capital punishment. They argued that New York has a sentencing option of life without parole that wasn't available in 1995. And they noted the advanced use of DNA to clear some suspects.

"If there was a death penalty at the time I caught this case, I wouldn't be here talking to y'all," Jeffrey Blake, a 35-year-old Brooklyn man, said at an anti-death penalty news conference preceding the hearing. Blake served eight years in prison after being convicted of a 1990 double homicide. He was later exonerated.

Joining him were two other wrongly convicted men, the father of a woman killed at the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing, and Bruce and Janice Grieshaber of Syracuse who spearheaded a campaign to end parole for violent felons in New York after their daughter was murdered.

"Our stance takes some people by surprise," Janice Grieshaber said. "When people tell me the death penalty is the only option for violent felons, I don't buy that."

The prosecution of the worst criminals also can become a political issue, especially if the case is particularly newsworthy and the district attorney is up for re-election.

The state's Capital Defender's Office, created under the 1995 death penalty law, found that after eight years in practice the death penalty was not being fairly sought. Upstate counties, for example, had 20 percent of the state's homicides but 65 percent of the death penalty cases. One Long Island county, Suffolk, sentenced three of the seven men who went to death row.

"This is a system that is imperfect at best," said Gerald Kogan, a retired chief justice on the Florida Supreme Court, who, during his career, prosecuted death penalty cases, defended them and finally presided over them.

Last year the Senate passed a bill to shore up the law, but the Assembly said it wouldn't move on a new law until it looked back over the nine years the death penalty was in place. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, has been a supporter of the death penalty, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, and Republican Gov. George Pataki want to see the law back on the books.

Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, D-Brooklyn, co-chaired Tuesday's hearing and said at least two more are planned before any legislation is introduced.

Sen. Dale Volker, R-Depew, has not reintroduced his bill into the Senate. A spokesman for Volker said the two houses of the Legislature could hold conference committee meetings to create legislation supported by both houses.

Erin Duggan can be reached at 454-5091 or by e-mail at eduggan@timesunion.com.