Topeka ? Prosecutors have warned Kansas legislators that tinkering with the state’s death penalty law this year could end up keeping seven convicted murderers, once condemned to die, off death row forever.

Yet the Senate will consider making changes anyway.

At issue is a December ruling from the Kansas Supreme Court that struck down the state’s death penalty law, offering a reprieve to those seven men on death row. Legislators can repair the law, but only the U.S. Supreme Court can reinstate the death sentences.

To do so, the nation’s high court must overturn the Kansas court’s decision. But prosecutors believe the U.S. Supreme Court won’t even review the case if legislators rewrite the 1994 law to fix the problem.

Despite that concern, senators plan to debate a bill Monday to fix the law. They also plan to discuss a bill that would repeal the death penalty statute and a resolution asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Kansas ruling.

Prosecutors aren’t alone in worrying about the debate’s outcome. Goddard resident Barbara Oblander’s son and daughter-in-law, Doug and Beth Brittain, were murdered in 1996. She believes, as a jury did, that lethal injection is the proper punishment for Gavin Scott, the man convicted of killing them.

“Those people who were sentenced to death earned the right to be there,” Oblander said.

But some senators argue that waiting to fix the law until the Supreme Court acts means any criminal committing a capital murder in the meantime can’t be sentenced to death.

“The media and our constituents are going to say, ‘Why didn’t you fix the problem?’ ” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman John Vratil, R-Leawood. “We’re going to be hanging out there, ripe for criticism.”

Meanwhile, the debate gives capital punishment opponents a chance to argue again the death penalty is too costly, fails to deter crime and can’t be administered fairly.

“People who 10 years ago might have said, “This is a good thing,’ now are not sure,” said Donna Schneweis, an anticapital punishment advocate from Topeka. “It is a debate we would have had, one way or the other.”

But Schneweis acknowledged she and other capital-punishment opponents wouldn’t have predicted that a debate this year would start with a Kansas Supreme Court ruling.

In its 4-3 decision, the court said the death penalty law was unconstitutional because of a provision governing how juries weigh evidence for and against imposing a death sentence. The law says that if the evidence is about equal, jurors must choose death.

The court’s majority said when the evidence is about equal, the defendant should benefit. To do otherwise violates a defendant’s right to due process and represents cruel and unusual punishment, the majority said.

While Kevin O’Connor, a Sedgwick County deputy district attorney involved in capital cases, disagrees with the court’s ruling, he said responding to it requires legislators to change only a few words in the law.

“If ultimately, they have to do the fix, the fix is very simple,” he said.

The ruling voided the death sentences of six men. They included Scott; Jonathan and Reginald Carr, convicted of killing five people in a December 2000 crime spree in Wichita; and John E. Robinson Sr., who was convicted of killing three women in Kansas and pleaded guilty to five other murders in Missouri.

A seventh man, Gary Kleypas, already had his death sentence overturned and was awaiting resentencing, with death still an option. He was convicted of killing Carrie Williams, a 20-year-old Pittsburg State University student, in 1996 after trying to rape her.

Atty. Gen. Phill Kline plans to appeal the Kansas court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is not certain the court will take the case. He and other prosecutors have said the Supreme Court will see less reason to intervene if legislators rewrite the law.

“I think a lot of us believe that the Kansas Supreme Court was just wrong,” said Johnson County Dist. Atty. Paul Morrison. “If we can get the United States Supreme Court to look at it, we think there’s a good chance they’ll reverse. The trick is getting them to look at it.”

Vratil said prosecutors are focusing on saving existing death sentences, rather than considering the potential of future capital cases.

“They’re looking at the bird in the hand, and they want to keep that bird in the hand,” he said.