Topeka ? A Senate committee endorsed a bill Tuesday clarifying Kansas’ ban on executing defendants who are mentally retarded, even though some panel members think it is too broad.

The measure is designed to bring the state’s 1994 capital punishment law into line with a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Virginia case. In prohibiting the execution of people who are mentally retarded, the Supreme Court said states should follow a “national consensus” on what constitutes mental retardation.

The bill would replace the words “mentally retarded” in the law with “has cognitive disability,” characterized by significant limitations in intellectual functioning and deficits in conceptual, social and adaptive skills. It would also prevent the execution of defendants whose mental functioning became impaired when they were adults, because of a severe head injury, for example.

Sen. Derek Schmidt proposed narrowing the bill so that the execution ban would apply only to defendants who have been mentally retarded since childhood. The proposal failed, 5-5.

“I would prefer to do the minimum amount that is necessary,” said Schmidt, R-Independence. “I’m just not comfortable that we know what we’re doing here, and that’s why I want to go slow.”

But Sen. David Haley said he sees no need for the state to execute people who do not function normally because of a head injury or other accident.

“What do we gain as a society in exacting the death penalty, except some retribution against a person who doesn’t understand the punishment they’re getting?” said Haley, D-Kansas City.

And Sen. Greta Goodwin, D-Winfield, said prosecutors who have recently voiced objections to the bill failed to do so during the committee’s hearings last week.

“We have had a lot of experts in front of us,” she said. “We’ve had hearings, and none of this was brought up.”

On a voice vote, the Judiciary Committee sent the measure to the Senate for debate.

An advisory group of judges and lawyers that studied the death penalty law last year said its definition of mental retardation, “functioning significantly below average intellectually,” does not conform with accepted clinical definitions. As a result, defendants could challenge the law’s constitutionality.

“When we deal with something that’s scrutinized as carefully as the death penalty, every word matters,” Schmidt said.

Kansas has seven people sentenced to death under the 1994 law. The state’s last executions, by hanging in 1965, occurred under a capital punishment law struck down as unconstitutional in 1973.