Washington ? The Supreme Court picked a Pennsylvania shooting rampage case on Tuesday to settle whether dozens of old death sentences should be thrown out because of poorly written jury instructions.

Justices will decide if some longtime death row inmates deserve a second chance at life sentences, under their 1988 ruling that set new standards for jury instructions.

The court has refused before to consider whether that ruling was retroactive, applying to people already on death row at the time. The justices decided to do so in the case of George E. Banks, who killed 13 people, including five of his young children, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Four of the victims of the September 1982 attack were mothers of his children.

Pennsylvania lawyers had told the court in filings that Banks “was one of the most notorious murderers in Pennsylvania history.”

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered the state either to give Banks a new sentencing hearing or automatically reduce his death sentence to life in prison.

Banks’ attorneys said the appeals court correctly ruled that jury instructions used by Pennsylvania wrongly implied that all jurors had to agree on mitigating circumstances, such as psychological problems, in order to spare defendants the death penalty.

The appeal was one of two death penalty cases justices added Tuesday to their docket for the coming term.

Even with the last-minute additions, capital punishment does not look to be a major theme of the 2003-04 term. Of the nearly 50 cases chosen for argument so far, just three are death penalty appeals. Two involve people named Banks. The other Banks appeal is from Texas death row inmate Delma Banks, which gives the court a chance to consider what happens when incompetent attorneys fail to do all they can to save a client from a death sentence.

The third case, announced Tuesday, asks whether Texas death row inmate Robert Smith had an adequate chance to prove he was mentally impaired.