The U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday that it will review a ruling that struck down Kansas’ capital punishment law, creating the possibility that seven former death row inmates eventually could face execution.

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision in December that the 1994 capital punishment law was flawed because of a single provision dealing with how juries weigh evidence for and against imposing a death sentence. Attorney General Phill Kline appealed.

The case is State v. Michael L. Marsh II. In the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s No. 04-1170. For the Kansas Supreme Court, it’s No. 81,135.

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Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison, who obtained a death sentence for serial killer John E. Robinson Sr., called the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision “great news.” He had argued that the state’s law was constitutional.

“I’ve always felt like that there was a good chance they’d want to hear it and right that wrong,” Morrison said.

But Bill Lucero, an anti-capital punishment activist from Topeka, said there’s a good chance the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the Kansas decision. He also predicted it would be the first of many legal challenges to the state law and individual capital murder convictions.

No one has been executed since the law took effect in 1994 and the state’s last executions, by hanging, were in 1965.

“This can go on forever,” Lucero said. “If we ever have one execution in this state, it’s going to be at significant cost at how ever many cases get reversed.”

The U.S. Supreme Court decision came in the case 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 nation’s highest court didn’t announce which justices wanted to review the case and which didn’t. At least four of the nine justices had to agree for the court to consider it.

The Kansas decision also invalidated the death sentences of five other convicted murders on Kansas’ death row. They included Jonathan and Reginald Carr, convicted of killing five people in a December 2000 crime spree in Wichita, and Robinson, who was convicted of killing three women in Kansas and pleaded guilty to five other murders in Missouri.

Another capital murder defendant, Gary W. Kleypas, had his sentence overturned in 2001 and was awaiting resentencing, with death still an option.

“They’re cases involving the most depraved, atrocious killings, some of them in the history of this state,” Morrison said.

The Kansas court ruling also applied to other cases that haven’t gone to trial, such as the June 2002 beating and strangling of 19-year-old Ali Kemp in Leawood, the shooting in January of Greenwood County Sheriff Matt Samuels and the shooting in April of Harvey County Deputy Sheriff Kurt Ford.

The provision that caused the Kansas court’s majority to strike down the death penalty law says if the evidence for and against imposing a sentence of death by injection is roughly equal, the jury must choose death instead of life in prison.

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

Legislators could have fixed the flaw easily but decided against it in this year’s session, which ended earlier this month. They had worried that passing legislation could discourage the U.S. Supreme Court from considering Kline’s appeal.

The Kansas decision angered some legislators because in 2001, the Kansas court considered the same issue in Kleypas’ case – and a majority declared that it would read the law in a constitutional manner.

However, after that ruling, four new justices joined the seven-member Kansas court, and Marsh’s case gave it the chance to reconsider.