Topeka ? The Kansas Supreme Court announced Friday that it has delayed issuing a decision in the death penalty case of Scott D. Cheever while the U.S. Supreme Court considers appeals in three other Kansas cases that raise similar issues.

Cheever was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2005 killing of Greenwood County Sheriff Matt Samuels.

Attorneys for both the prosecution and defense in the Cheever case agreed to the stay, according to a statement from the court.

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering appeals in three other death penalty cases from Kansas. In each case, the Kansas high court vacated death sentences due to procedural errors in the sentencing phase of the trials.

Those cases involve Jonathan and Reginald Carr, who were convicted and sentenced for a brutal murder spree in December 2000 in which four people were shot execution-style in a frozen field near Wichita.

The third case involves Sidney Gleason, who was convicted of killing two people near Great Bend in 2004 as part of an effort to prevent them from providing evidence about an earlier robbery.

One of the issues on appeal common to all of the cases is whether juries in the penalty phase of the trial must be told that the defense does not have to prove mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under Kansas law, the death penalty can only be applied if the prosecution proves certain aggravating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt. But the law puts no similar burden on the defense when presenting mitigating circumstances.

The Kansas Supreme Court reversed Cheever’s conviction and death sentence once, in 2013, on the basis that the court violated his 5th amendment right against self incrimination by admitting into evidence statements he had given to federal authorities in a separate proceeding.

But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision a few months later and remanded it to Kansas to be considered again.

Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994, but since then the Kansas Supreme Court has overturned virtually every death sentence it has considered and, to date, no one has yet been executed under the 1994 law.