Topeka ? Atty. Gen. Phill Kline asked the Kansas Supreme Court on Wednesday to reconsider a recent decision striking down the state’s death penalty law.

The request suggested that the court could allow most of the capital punishment statute to stand and invalidate only a flawed provision that led to the court’s 4-3 ruling.

The provision deals with how juries weigh evidence for and against imposing a death sentence. It says that if the evidence is roughly equal, the jury must choose death instead of life in prison.

The court’s majority said when the evidence was about equal, the defendant should benefit. The provision represents cruel and unusual punishment and violates defendants’ rights to due legal process, the majority said.

Kline’s request, filed for him by an assistant attorney general, said the court didn’t consider striking down only the provision rather than the entire law.

The court stayed its decision last week to allow Kline to pursue an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kline spokesman Whitney Watson said such an appeal would come after the Kansas court considered the attorney general’s latest request.

The Kansas court ruling, issued Dec. 17, came in the appeal of Michael Marsh II of Wichita, who was sentenced to die for the June 1996 deaths of Marry Ane Pusch, 21, and Marry Elizabeth Pusch, who was 19 months old.

The decision, if it stands, also would invalidate the death sentences for five other convicted murders on Kansas’ death row. Another capital murder defendant, Gary W. Kleypas, had his sentence overturned in 2001 and was awaiting resentencing.