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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

'How do you feel right now?' Bentham asked him.

'Pretty miserable,' Walker replied. He said he felt terrible inside for what he had done.

Over the phone, Webb approved charges of homicide, aggravated assault, burglary, criminal trespass, reckless endangerment of another person, possession of an unlicensed firearm and possession of an instrument of crime.

THE SHOOTING OF RICARDO THOMAS WAS AN ordinary murder. Something similar happens more than once a day in Philadelphia. And as the case wound its way through the various steps of the prosecution, District Attorney Abraham treated it in the usual way -- seeking the death penalty, as she does in all murders like this one. 'It was coldbloodedly going from one person to another, planned for when the victims were the most defenseless,' she says. But Abraham's usual practice is unusual in America; no prosecutor in the country uses the death penalty more. If Walker had been charged in Pittsburgh or many other American cities, the District Attorney would most likely have asked for life imprisonment instead of death; Walker's mental anguish and lack of a violent history would have taken the crime out of the small group of homicides thought to warrant execution. But Abraham's office seeks death virtually as often as the law will allow. As a result, Philadelphia County's death-row population of 105 is the third largest of any county's in the nation, close behind Houston's Harris County and Los Angeles County -- counties far more populous and murderous than Philadelphia.

Until this year, Philadelphia's aggressive use of the death penalty had been hidden from view because Pennsylvania, with the fourth-largest death row of any state -- 190 men and 4 women -- had actually executed no one in 33 years. Execution warrants require the Governor's signature, and Gov. Tom Ridge's predecessors were reluctant to sign them. But since taking office in January, Ridge has signed 15: on May 2, Pennsylvania carried out his first warrant, executing Keith Zettlemoyer, the first man to be put to death in a Northeastern state since 1967; the next likely execution is set for Aug. 15. And 55 percent of the state's death row is from Philadelphia.

'It was a nonevent for me,' Abraham, 54, tells me the day after Zettlemoyer's execution as we drive to visit a drug treatment center. 'I don't feel anything.'

Where others might see gray, Abraham does not: 'When it comes to the death penalty, I am passionate. I truly believe it is manifestly correct.' She considers it the appropriate response to horrible crime, and the right thing to do for the families of murder victims.

She's not bothered by the death penalty's expense: a death sentence, with its accompanying drawn-out trial and series of appeals, is estimated to cost $3 million, three times more than locking up someone for life in Pennsylvania. 'I don't care how many millions it costs, given the billions wasted every year in large cities. Please don't tell me about cost when talking about the rights of the victim. It's of no interest to me. It's not even a consideration. Whatever it costs is worth it.'

Abraham is a death penalty purist. Prosecutors in other cities seek death more often when the victim is white. But Abraham seeks it regardless of the victim's color or status. But because the killers of blacks tend to be black, that also means that Philadelphia's death row has the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country.

I ask if she has ever seen a death sentence given to someone who didn't deserve it. 'No, I have not seen that,' she replies. I mention a man who spent four years on death row only to be found to have been framed by the Philadelphia police, who lied on the stand. 'He wasn't executed,' she says. 'The system worked.'

Abraham believes in the death penalty, but also supports it because her constituents do. To her, it doesn't offer society control over crime -- she doesn't believe it's a deterrent -- but instead gives the feeling of control demanded by a city in decay. 'When I was a kid you could sleep out on your porch in summertime,' Abraham says. We are driving up Broad Street, the main avenue heading north from downtown. The once-pleasant two-story brick row houses are now covered with graffiti or burned out by crack users setting fires to keep warm. 'We are so overwhelmed by cruelty and barbarism, and most people feel the legal system doesn't work. We feel our lives are not in our own hands.

'I've looked at all those sentenced to be executed. No one will shed a tear. Prison is too good for them. They don't deserve to live. I represent the victim and the family. I don't care about killers. All of our cases now are multiple gunshot executions, houses set on fire and six children burned to death. This is Bosnia.'

IT USED TO BE A GIVEN IN AMERICA THAT THE death penalty's greatest champions wore bolo ties and sunglasses and kept their cowboy boots up on the desk. Today, however, no one is a greater champion of the death penalty than this lover of Impressionist painting and the arias of Cecilia Bartoli, this woman who carries cans of Little Friskies in the trunk of her official car to regale stray cats, this gray-haired, barrel-bodied, freckle-cheeked, wisecracking Democrat in the City of Brotherly Love.

While the death penalty is the subject of a vociferous national debate, it really boils down to a series of decisions made by local elected officials. Once the death penalty is law, 'the D.A. controls everything,' says Robert Spangenberg, a leading expert on the death penalty who runs a criminal justice consulting firm in Newton, Mass. Prosecutorial discretion insures that the lives of identical murderers committing identical crimes can be valued completely differently on the opposite sides of a county line.

Pittsburgh's District Attorney, for example, is as sparing in the application of the death penalty as Philadelphia's is ardent. In Houston, the prosecutor uses it much more than his Dallas counterpart. In South Carolina, Susan Smith, accused of killing her two sons, faces the death penalty while O. J. Simpson, also an accused double-murderer, does not. After the New York Legislature and Gov. George Pataki brought back the death penalty to the state, District Attorney Robert T. Johnson of the Bronx announced that he would never ask for the death penalty; Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, expressed strong reservations about capital punishment in a February Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, writing that the death penalty 'actually hinders the fight against crime.' William Fitzpatrick, the District Attorney of Syracuse, by contrast, said he will seek it in about a third of all murder cases.

Philadelphia has few rivals for prosecutorial zeal in seeking death. One is Cook County in Chicago, but prosecutors there will sometimes not seek death even when the law permits it, while Philadelphia's virtually always do. The District Attorney in New Orleans asks for death whenever the law allows, but it is a smaller city with fewer murders than Philadelphia, and the District Attorney asks for death knowing there is little likelihood of getting it: juries have returned death sentences only twice in five years. Many Southern prosecutors nationally renowned as death penalty advocates, like Johnny B. Holmes Jr. in Houston, seek it far less often than Abraham does.

Philadelphia's controversial use of the death penalty, however, is worth examining, as capital punishment surges in popularity. This year, New York became the 38th state to adopt it, and legislatures are broadening laws to apply it to more and more crimes. As public support increases, so does the political risk for those who oppose it. Gov. Mario Cuomo's consistent vetoes of death penalty bills were key to his defeat. Many Americans who were once uneasy about the death penalty are less squeamish today. Abraham and her staff reflect a growing public feeling that there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Since Pennsylvania revived the death penalty in 1978, Philadelphia has had three District Attorneys, two Democrats and one Republican, all strong personal supporters of capital punishment. But Abraham has gone one step further, by asking for the death penalty in more cases than even her predecessors did. And Philadelphia, which suffers high rates of crime and drug addiction, supports it overwhelmingly. It has always been a law-and-order city where politicians like Frank Rizzo could thrive. 'During the Rizzo years, there was not a lot of difference between Philadelphia, Penn., and Philadelphia, Miss.,' says David Bradley, whose novels have been praised as realistic portrayals of Philadelphia. 'It is a city of ethnically oriented neighborhoods, and people tend to see people who aren't like them as invading. The city can also be very dangerous, and we don't accept that as normal, like Manhattan does.'

But the rate of support for the death penalty in Philadelphia is the same as it is nationwide, 75 to 80 percent. A more significant reason for the prosecutor's extraordinary use of it is found in Philadelphia's legal politics. The city has an unusually impoverished system for representing defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. And in the mid-1970's, Philadelphia was the first city to reserve a group of specialized judges to hear only homicide cases. (Milwaukee began a program in 1991.) Prosecutors have been able to knock lenient judges out of the program and steer the most serious cases to a handful of those most sympathetic to their charges. The most notorious was Judge Albert F. Sabo, now retired, who alone presided over 31 death sentences, more than any judge in the country. He made suggestions to prosecutors on how to strengthen their cases and routinely denied money to defense attorneys to pay for experts, even psychiatrists to examine the defendant.

Most important, since crime became a hot public issue in the late 1960's, Philadelphia has had a series of historically media-savvy, ambitious District Attorneys -- including Senator Arlen Specter and Mayor Ed Rendell -- who have taken full advantage of their opportunities. Over the years, prosecutors have learned that aggressiveness is rewarded. I asked John Packel, the chief of the appellate division of Philadelphia's public defender office, if he could think of any issue on which anyone in Abraham's office took anything short of the toughest stance. 'One individual has shown personal humanity to terminally ill prisoners in their last few months,' he said. 'But I won't tell you who, because to say someone's humane might get them into trouble.'

Toughness sometimes crosses the line into misconduct. Barbara Christie, who was chief of homicide before Dave Webb, frequently had her convictions reversed by higher courts for hiding evidence that indicated a defendant's innocence, and for knocking blacks off juries. Abraham demoted Christie, who had become a magnet for criticism. In 1992, Vincent Cirillo, a Superior Court judge, wrote in reversing a Philadelphia homicide conviction: 'We are especially concerned that prosecutorial misconduct seems to arise in Philadelphia County more so than in any other county in this Commonwealth.' He admonished prosecutors 'to understand that the Commonwealth's client is justice.'

A FEW DAYS AFTER THE RICARDO THOMAS murder, Webb assigned the Shawn Walker case to Charles Ehrlich, a 38-year-old lawyer in the homicide unit. The day before the preliminary hearing, Ehrlich spent 45 minutes going over the file he had received from the police. Outside the courtroom just before the hearing, he met with one of the detectives, Bentham, and Lisa Johnson's mother, Gladys McKnight, to go over their testimony. McKnight, surprisingly composed, testified that Walker had come over earlier in the day demanding sex from Johnson, who refused. He was never allowed in the house unless she and her husband were there, she said. (It seemed that Walker's portrayal of an ideal day spent with Johnson, his kids and his family was pure fantasy.) She described coming downstairs when her husband yelled and seeing Thomas dead and her daughter wounded. Bentham then detailed Walker's confession. The judge agreed that the evidence merited trying Walker on the specified charges.

When Ehrlich got back to the District Attorney's office, a 10-story building a short sprint from the courtroom, he reviewed the evidence and once again read over Walker's criminal record, which consisted of two pleas to auto theft. He pulled out a Notice of Aggravating Circumstances, a form commonly known as a 352. Since the passage of Rule 352 in 1989, prosecutors have had to give this form to the defendant's attorney at the arraignment, usually 10 days after the preliminary hearing, thus alerting the defense that prosecutors consider the case potentially capital. Of the 16 possible aggravating circumstances, Ehrlich checked the boxes next to 2. One check would have been enough; the great machine began to creak into motion.

The United States Supreme Court struck down the death penalty nationwide in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, ruling that its application was 'arbitrary and capricious.' In 1976, the Court permitted states to revive the death penalty as long as the laws 'genuinely narrow' the class of eligible defendants. Two years later, Pennsylvania joined other states in passing a revised death penalty law to meet the Court's standards. In most states, if a jury finds the defendant guilty of a death-eligible crime, the same jury will reconvene to decide the penalty. In Pennsylvania, that means jurors will choose between death by lethal injection and life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole.

The laws try to establish a hierarchy of evil. Not all murderers, but only a tiny group of the most culpable first-degree murderers, are considered to be so evil that they must forfeit their lives. Juries make this decision in the penalty phase by weighing aggravating and mitigating factors. Aggravating factors are those that increase the defendant's moral culpability: having a significant history of convictions for violent crimes, perhaps, or having killed a police officer, a witness in an upcoming trial or a child under 12.

To ask for the death penalty, prosecutors must indicate in the 352 that they will try to prove at least one aggravator, as they are called. Ehrlich checked the most common: that the murder was committed during the perpetration of a felony (usually a robbery, but here a criminal trespass), and that the act created a grave risk of death to another person. Typically, in the penalty phase of a trial, the defense contests the aggravators and tries to prove mitigating factors that lessen a murderer's culpability.

Pennsylvania's law allows prosecutors to file the 352 in large numbers of cases: in Philadelphia, 85 percent of all homicides have at least one aggravator. Unlike prosecutors in most states, where defendants are charged with first-, second- or third-degree homicide, prosecutors in Pennsylvania charge criminal homicide and let the jury choose the degree. This means prosecutors can file the 352 and the defendant may later be found guilty of only second- or third-degree homicide. And the list of aggravators keeps growing. In the 1978 death penalty law the Legislature specified 10, but has since added 7 more. 'They have been interpreted so expansively that they may no longer serve the constitutionally required function of providing a principled basis to distinguish between capital and noncapital crimes,' maintains Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Post-Conviction Defender Organization, which is state and federally financed to assist indigent death-row inmates and their attorneys with appeals. The most elastic aggravator, 'grave risk of death,' has been cited whenever a shooting takes place near bystanders.

BY THE TIME LYNNE ABRAHAM TOOK OVER THE Philadelphia District Attorney's office, she was well schooled in the politics of toughness. When Mayor Frank Rizzo, newly elected, named Abraham, then 31, head of the city's Redevelopment Authority in 1972, he introduced her at the news conference as 'one tough cookie.' She has worn the label proudly since.

She grew up a tomboy alley-prowler in West Philadelphia. Her father was a man of many professions: butcher, nightclub owner, hand cream manufacturer. He was also a bookie, and took his young daughter on collection runs. No one from her family had ever finished high school.

She put herself through Temple University and Temple Law School, graduating in 1965. She says she spent two years in a 'boring' job at the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and then landed in the office of District Attorney Specter. At night and on weekends she investigated cases in rough neighborhoods. 'She'd do whatever she had to do to win,' recalls Jose Melendez, now a police captain, who in the early 1970's was an officer on the midnight shift in the polygraph office. 'She walked into my office at 1:30 in the morning wearing a .38 in a holster, carrying two cups of coffee and a dozen doughnuts. We had taken a statement from one of the accused, and she was prepping the case.'

In 1971, she met Rizzo, who was then the police commissioner, and complained to him that a botched job by his ballistics lab had cost her a conviction. Rizzo fired the ballistics expert and took notice of the assistant district attorney. Fourteen months after Mayor Rizzo brought Abraham in to the Redevelopment Authority, he fired her -- for refusing to hire the patronage file clerks he kept sending her way. She became a celebrity for standing up to Rizzo. Job offers poured in and reporters lined up to profile her.

In 1975, despite having neither party's endorsement, she was the top vote-getter in the campaign for Municipal Court Judge and became the court's first woman. The next year, she married Frank Ford, a family friend 26 years her senior. Like her father, Ford did a little of everything. His real name was Eddie Felbin, but he changed it several times for different ventures. In 1946, he took the name Frank Ford when he became host of a radio program sponsored by the Unity-Frankford grocery chain. Ford is still the host of a local talk show.

In 1979, Abraham won a seat on the Court of Common Pleas and in 1983 became one of the small group of judges that handle only homicide trials, hearing about 50 cases a year. She was considered a knowledgeable, firm, courteous and extremely tough judge. Chris Adair, a defense lawyer in the city, describes her as having been 'more like a prosecutor than a judge.'

In 1991, Ron Castille, in his second term as District Attorney, quit to run for Mayor. Abraham, who had begun to feel she was not 'making a difference' on the court, competed to win an appointment by a board of Common Pleas judges to fill the vacancy. She became District Attorney in May 1991, bringing Arnold Gordon, formerly chief of homicide, back from the United States Attorney's Strike Force to run the office on a day-to-day basis as her first assistant. In November 1991, Abraham was elected, unopposed, by the general public, and in another election, in 1993, won 76 percent of the vote. She was so popular that had election law not prohibited it, she would have been the candidate of both parties.

Abraham spends most of her time as the public face of her office; the day-to-day handling of cases is left to her staff. In June 1991, the Shawn Walker file passed to Arlene Fisk, an assistant district attorney, for the arraignment. Walker was brought into the courtroom wearing prison clothes. He was informed of the charges against him, and Barnaby Wittels, his court-appointed attorney, entered a routine not-guilty plea to each charge. Fisk handed Wittels a file of evidence the police had collected and the 352. Wittels was now on notice: the Commonwealth was likely to seek death.

A few weeks after the arraignment, Webb, the chief of homicide, looked at the file and decided to offer Walker the chance to plead guilty to first-degree murder. 'When you kill twice -- which is what he was trying to do -- these are the types of cases the death penalty is enacted for,' Webb says. 'I wouldn't have agonized over it. But there were some suicide attempts, and maybe he had a mental-health problem. A life sentence can take him off the streets for life.' Webb instructed Fisk to call Wittels and offer his client life plus 10 to 20 years for aggravated assault. Webb offered a life sentence in exchange for a plea in most homicides, although, he says, it was seldom accepted.

Wittels went to see Walker in Holmsburg Prison and advised him of the deal. 'I want to go to trial,' Walker said.

The Rule 352 given to Walker's attorney was not the District Attorney's final say on the death penalty; it simply preserved prosecutors' right to seek death if they wanted to. But since they almost always sought death at trial after filing a 352, it effectively signaled that a case was a death case. In most jurisdictions, prosecutors file such notice in a small percentage of eligible homicides: in Pittsburgh, for example, W. Christopher Conrad, Allegheny County's deputy district attorney for homicide, estimates that his office files a Rule 352 in about a quarter of the cases where aggravators are present. Philadelphia files one in virtually every case. Charles J. Grant, the current chief of the homicide unit (he replaced Webb in 1994), says his office is disinclined to use prosecutorial discretion that might narrow the law's scope: 'If the law created aggravating circumstances and we don't use them consistently, people will say you seek it in some cases and not others. If there are aggravating circumstances, we file notice. If they are not there, we don't.'

This is partly due to the historic aggressive culture of the office, but Mark E. Gottlieb, a defense lawyer who was homicide chief under Castille, says it has become more strident under Abraham.

Gottlieb and other former prosecutors say they've sought the death penalty in part because it allows them to keep a permanent thumb on the scale. 'You're an advocate and you want to use everything you can,' he says.

Michael McGovern, a homicide prosecutor who left the office in 1993, says: 'You can hold the defendant without bail, and it gives you leverage in negotiating guilty pleas. The defense attorney has to sit down with the client and say, 'You're looking at a possible death penalty.' He may want to cut a deal.'

Given the extra work it takes to defend a client in a death case, the 352 can also keep a good lawyer from taking a poorly paid job representing an indigent defendant. It also brings advantages at trial. Prosecutors in death cases get 20 peremptory challenges -- striking potential jurors for no stated reason -- instead of the 7 in a noncapital case. Also, the jury must be 'death qualified.' Prospective jurors in capital cases are questioned about their attitudes toward the death penalty. Jurors who say they could never impose it and those who say they always would (a far rarer point of view) are excluded. 'Everyone who's ever prosecuted a murder case wants a death-qualified jury,' says Brian McMonagle, a homicide prosecutor from 1986 to 1989, now a defense lawyer.

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'A trial is 90 percent jury selection,' McGovern says. 'My perception is that minorities tend to say much more often that they are opposed to the death penalty. Prosecutors are aware of that. A lot of Latinos and blacks will be lost on these questions.'

Gottlieb argues that seeking death for prosecutorial advantage in every eligible case plays with people's lives. 'Individuals who commit murders who truly don't deserve death get it,' he says. 'In human terms, this is what is lost when we start talking academically, saying if we can seek it under the law, we do it. It's beyond wrong. It's brutal.'

Abraham's response is that they all do deserve death. 'We don't do what a lot of people say, which is ask for it when we don't intend to get it,' she says. 'Every time we ask, it's because we think it's appropriate.'

Shawn Walker would probably not have faced the death penalty had he been tried in Pittsburgh. 'We're starting a trial that is not factually dissimilar,' Christopher Conrad, the city's homicide chief, told me in May. 'We didn't seek death, although there are several aggravators present. The defendant had a slight mental history and was quite drunk. He'll never see the light of day.' When I checked with Conrad 10 days later, the defendant had received a sentence of life in prison.

Conrad has been trying homicide cases in Pittsburgh since 1984, working under Robert E. Colville, the marine turned football coach turned police chief who has been Allegheny County's District Attorney since 1976. A relaxed, white-haired man of 60, Colville is as popular in Pittsburgh as Abraham is in Philadelphia -- the last time he even had an opponent was 1979, although he will have one this fall.

His attitude toward the death penalty, however, differs greatly from hers. 'I could live with it or without it,' Colville says. 'I never had a lot of thought that the ultimate revenge was necessary. The death penalty can't cure everything.' He was raised in the city's rough Manchester neighborhood. 'A lot of kids I ran with went in the wrong direction,' he says. 'I always felt that but for the grace of God that could easily be me.'

Conrad says their office tries to individualize each case.'We weigh ourselves the mitigating and aggravating factors,' he says. 'If we find a severe mental defect we'll even decide in the killing of a police officer that the mitigating circumstances are significant enough to recognize. Of course, it's easier to make that decision because of life without parole.' Last year, Pittsburgh filed 8 352's, Philadelphia filed at least 159.

'A lot of times Philadelphia does it to get a plea to life and a death-qualified jury,' Colville says. 'That has never happened here. When I say I'm going to take your life, I must deeply believe you should be executed. I'm not going to bargain with you. We will not use it for gaining a prosecutorial advantage.'

Colville enjoys a few luxuries that Abraham does not. Allegheny County, which is made up of Pittsburgh and its suburbs, has fewer homicides -- 104 among its population of 1.35 million last year. Philadelphia County, by contrast, is all city, with 1.6 million people and 404 murders. And Pittsburgh is only beginning to suffer Philadelphia's violent gang problem. As there are more gang killings, which often involve the murder of witnesses in upcoming cases, Pittsburgh is asking for death slightly more often. A lower homicide rate also allows an in-depth look at all the factors of the case before the deadline for filing a 352.

During the 1994 campaign, with its focus on crime ('It's our only issue,' a spokeswoman for Governor Ridge's campaign told me at the time), Colville drew attention by writing Op-Ed pieces in Pennsylvania newspapers with headlines like 'Pennsylvania's Plenty Tough on Prisoners,' arguing that the state had more inmates serving life without parole than any other state. Another article criticized what he saw as politicians' oversimplification of crime. 'It's so easy to politicize criminal law,' he says. 'You're getting youth violence of the kind that's really frightening people. But these calls for Draconian practices mislead the public.'

The 1994 campaign was in itself a classic illustration of the political pressures on officials who deal with crime. The Democratic candidate for Governor, Lieut. Gov. Mark S. Singel, had been chairman of Pennsylvania's Board of Pardons, which reviews the sentences of long-term prisoners, recommending the commutation for good behavior of about two sentences a year. A month before the election, Reginald McFadden, one of those Singel's board had released, was arrested for the kidnapping, rape and robbery of a New York woman and was a suspect in a murder. Overnight, Singel went from leading Ridge by 4 points to trailing him by 12.

McFadden cost Singel the election. All prosecutors and judges have hundreds of potential McFaddens lurking in their pasts; Singel's campaign staff was also busy digging up cases in which Ridge, a former prosecutor, had taken anything short of the toughest stance. There is only one way to be safe: Always take the most hard-line position possible.

Its political value is the unstated dark side to prosecutors' argument that they use the death penalty because their public demands it. One thing the most fervent district attorneys share is political ambition. For example, take the three recent Chicago prosecutors who have been avid users of the death penalty in Cook County, the only large county that rivals Philadelphia for aggressiveness: Bernard Carey went on to lose a race for County Board President, Richard M. Daley is now Mayor and the current prosecutor, Jack O'Malley, has openly been contemplating higher office. Harry Connick Sr., New Orleans's District Attorney, ran for Louisiana Attorney General in 1987. Philadelphia's current death penalty habits were instituted by District Attorney Ed Rendell and continued by his successors, Castille and Abraham. After two terms as District Attorney, Rendell left the post in 1985 to run for Governor in 1986, and lost, and the next year ran for Mayor. He lost that race as well, but in 1991 ran again for Mayor, and won -- beating Castille.

It would surprise no one if Lynne Abraham aimed for higher office. She wields a rake at neighborhood cemetery cleanups. She judges local talent shows. She bowls in the Big Brothers-Big Sisters Bowl-a-Thon. 'I don't know the difference between private and public,' she says. Once she drove during a flood, through major intersections completely under water, to the northwest end of Philadelphia to speak to the Roxborough Condominium Association. 'I'll go out and talk to three people,' she says. 'I'll go anywhere. I don't think a lot of D.A.'s do that.'

Her cleanup outings symbolize the importance of neighborhood action, one of her favorite crime-fighting themes. They also make good politics. Her community relations coordinator, Chris Sample, is also the coordinator of her re-election campaign. 'She has an 80 percent approval rating,' he says. 'She really does have command of audience.'

Rarely wearing makeup, she sometimes gives speeches in jeans, T-shirt and a windbreaker with hair that badly needs a comb. On her way to a Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition luncheon one weekday, Abraham shares the elevator with two balding, expensively suited, late-middle-aged captains of industry. She tells them about cleaning up the Fairhill cemetery in North Philadelphia the Saturday before. 'All around us the narcotics traffic just kept going,' she says. 'Then five guys come up to the fence, whip it out and start urinating all over.' She illustrates 'whip it out' with the appropriate hand motion.

One Saturday morning between appearances she has coffee downtown at the Reading Terminal Market. As she walks out a young man in shorts stops her. 'Good luck in the campaign,' he calls. The primary is in three days.

'I'm not running this time, but remember me when I do,' she replies.

'For Mayor,' he says.

'We'll see.' She smiles and gives him a salute. 'There are limits on the Mayor's term,' she tells me. 'So the seat will come open in 1999. But it's best not to set your sights so far ahead. Anything can happen.'

INSIDE THE DISTRICT attorney's office, the Walker file made its way in the fall of 1991 to Randolph Williams, a tall, slim, bearded and bespectacled black man, then 49. (One-third of the homicide prosecutors are black or Hispanic, among them Charles Grant, the chief of the unit.) Williams had joined homicide in 1986 and had tried about a hundred murder cases. He spent a day reading the file, writing a summary of each witness's statement. He called Lisa Johnson's and Ricardo Thomas's families. 'I don't know when we're going to trial, but I'll be back in touch when I have more information,' he told them.

Then he wrote the memo to Abraham that sealed the decision to seek death. He recounted the details of the crime, putting particular emphasis on the evidence that Thomas had been sleeping and that Johnson was likely to remain paralyzed on her right side. Most important, he set out why he felt he could prove the two aggravators. 'It is imperative that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania seek death against this defendant if he is convicted of murder in the first degree,' his memo concluded.

Williams sent it to Dave Webb. It came back to Williams a week later, approved by Webb, Raymond J. Harley (deputy district attorney), Arnold Gordon (first assistant district attorney) and Abraham. Williams never doubted it would be approved. He had sent 20 such memos in his career -- each time the office had filed a 352. All had been approved.

The Walker case was typical; except in the few instances in which a defendant accepts a plea to first-degree murder, in virtually every case prosecutors feel they can prove an aggravator they will seek the death penalty at trial. But this is done in few other cities. Far more common is the practice of Houston, where prosecutors ask for death at trial only when they are fairly sure they can win. In 1991, the last year for which figures are available for comparison, Houston's prosecutors sought death in 7 cases at trial and won it in 6. That year, Philadelphia sought it at trial in at least 59 cases, and probably many more (such information is recorded only when the trial results in a first-degree conviction), and won it 12 times.

Williams says he has never seen a death penalty he considered undeserved. 'I've questioned why a jury didn't give a guy the death penalty, not the reverse,' he says.

In the late fall of 1991, Williams sent a van to pick up Johnson, who was undergoing rehabilitation -- learning to write with her left hand and walk a few steps. He went over her testimony with her in a prep room across the hall from his office. He also called in the rest of the witnesses, the police and the medical experts. No investigation was necessary: the police had done a thorough job.

When Barney Wittels went to visit Walker in the summer of 1991, Wittels found him sullen and uncommunicative. 'He felt his attorney was just another agent of the state,' Wittels says. 'He was filled with a lot of denial about the case and told me various stories that didn't pan out. He was particularly uncooperative when it came to getting witnesses.'

Wittels didn't expect Walker to be found not guilty -- he had, after all, confessed -- but he thought the jury might find the murder unpremeditated, and at least give him life in prison.

'He was an abused child, bounced around from relative to relative,' Wittels says. Such information might have helped to persuade the jury that Walker was so distraught at losing the only love he had ever had that he acted under 'extreme mental or emotional disturbance' -- a mitigating factor. But Wittels had no details. Walker had told him that his mother, Annette, would put him in touch with family members and friends, but Annette refused to take Wittels's phone calls and even denied she was Walker's mother. Wittels says he put 60 hours into the case, 20 spent trying to talk to uncooperative neighbors. He received $500 from the court for an investigator, but wasn't able to do much of the work experts say is necessary to prove mitigating factors.

In the rest of Pennsylvania and in major cities outside the South, defending indigents is the job of public defenders. Philadelphia's public defenders, like most, are well-regarded lawyers, but until 1993 they were barred from handling homicide cases. Judges and private lawyers preferred to maintain a patronage system where judges appointed counsel for poor defendants -- lawyers who were often contributors to judicial campaigns or the children of local politicians.

When lawyers are hired to defend wealthier clients, they routinely charge $50,000 for a capital case, more than twice their usual fees for noncapital defense. Preparing an adequate defense in all trials where death is sought is equally expensive -- regardless of whether the defendant is given death, a prison sentence or is acquitted.

The vast majority of defendants in capital cases, however, are indigent and need city paid and appointed lawyers.

In these cases, Philadelphia pays a $1,700 flat fee for preparation and $400 for each day in court. This averages $2,700 a case, according to Geoff Gallas, the executive administrator of Philadelphia's courts -- scant incentive for doing a good job. 'Anyone thinking of this as their financial base cannot be putting in the work necessary,' says Esther Lardent, chief consultant to the Post-Conviction Death Penalty Representation Project at the American Bar Association. Nationally, she says, attorneys put an average of 500 hours into a capital case.

Philadelphia's court-appointed defense attorneys consider the fee an improvement over the old system, which at times made them wait a year to be paid. Another improvement is that they now get $300 up front for an investigator and can ask for a small amount for other experts. But many judges often deny these requests, and lawyers are loath to annoy judges by pushing it. Many experts who testify in court elsewhere refuse to testify for the defense in Philadelphia because their fees are cut or simply go unpaid.

'Like everyone else, I lose most of my appointed cases,' Wittels says. 'I do better when I'm privately retained and I have the resources to do the job.' Referring to Philadelphia, Lardent says, 'We know a lot of people sitting on death row more because of a bad lawyer than because they participated in a heinous crime.'

The quality of the defense can play a large role in prosecutors' decisions to seek death and juries' decisions to impose it. In 1992, Indiana instituted a law that radically improved its neglected indigent defense. Now, each capital defendant gets two attorneys, each paid $70 an hour, and money for reasonable experts. Since its passage, juries, which used to return five or six death penalties a year, have returned one in three years. 'That law has swayed prosecutors not to ask for death,' says Larry Landis, executive director of the Indiana Public Defender Council. 'Requests for death have been cut in half.'

When Philadelphia judges realized that their pool of lawyers willing to take homicide appointments had shrunk to about 50, public defenders were brought in to take one case in five. A defendant who draws them is lucky indeed: two attorneys, a mitigation specialist and an investigator work on each case, and there is a psychiatrist on staff and a fund for expert witnesses. Since the public defenders began taking murder cases in April 1993, their clients have not been given a single death sentence, while those privately represented -- most, if not all, court appointed -- have been given 33.

Jury selection in the Walker trial began on Feb. 24, 1992. A death-qualified jury of six blacks and six whites was seated the next day. Witness by witness, Randolph Williams built his case, presenting the crime scene, Walker's confession, the autopsy and ballistics evidence and the testimony of Johnson's family. The most important witness was Johnson herself. The jurors had to sit on the edge of their seats to see her in her wheelchair and hear her tiny, barely audible voice. Walker had once brought over a birthday cake, Johnson testified. That was the only thing he ever did for his children. She testified that she saw him shoot Thomas and saw him stand over her, point his gun, say 'That's what you get for playing' and fire into her head.

On March 2, Wittels opened his case and called Shawn Walker. Walker testified that he had gone to Johnson's house at 3:30 A.M. to talk about a reconciliation, but that when he went in he saw her hugging and kissing Ricardo Thomas. Then, Walker said, Thomas reached for what seemed to be a gun and Walker shot in self-defense. After that, he said, he was so distraught he had no idea what had happened to Johnson.

Well, Mr. Walker, Williams said in the cross-examination, let's look at what you told the police. Wittels sat glumly watching his client get crushed. He called no other witnesses. After closing arguments the next day, the jurors filed out. Ninety minutes later they indicated that they had reached a verdict: guilty of first-degree murder and all other charges.

Wittels had been pleading with Annette, Walker's closest relative, to testify in the penalty phase slated for later that day,, but she never came to court. Neither did Walker agree to take the stand then. 'I wanted him to talk about his life and his suicide attempts,' Wittels says. 'I wanted to establish that he had been under extreme mental duress.' No witnesses were called. Two and a half hours after jurors left the courtroom they returned with a sentence of death. This March, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the sentence. According to Pennsylvania law, by early August Governor Ridge must sign a death warrant setting an execution date for the fall. Walker plans to appeal. As in all cases, Abraham's office will fight the appeal. 'We're going to pursue every avenue of appeal,' Abraham says. 'We didn't go this far just to fall over in a faint. It's our obligation to the victim's family.' ALL DEATH PENALTY POLITICS IS LOCAL While the death penalty is debated nationwide, the decision to use it is mostly in the hands of local prosecutors. The following are examples of varying policies. Stephanie Tubbs Jones Since becoming Cuyahoga County Prosecutor in 1991, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a former judge, has cut back on her predecessor's heavy use of the death penalty in Cleveland, reserving it for fewer than six cases a year.

Robert M. Morgenthau Before New York enacted the death penalty in March, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of Manhattan argued against it, saying it hinders the fight against crime. Now, he says, 'I intend to exercise that discretion wisely.'

Robert T. Johnson District Attorney Robert T. Johnson of the Bronx has announced that he will not seek the death penalty under any circumstances, citing 'intense respect for the value and sanctity of human life.'

Johnny B. Holmes Jr. 'I'm not shot in the [ expletive ] with compassion,' said Johnny B. Holmes Jr., of Houston. Holmes asked for the death penalty in 16 cases last year -- 10 percent of the total eligible cases -- and received it 14 times.

John Vance John Vance of Dallas County is reputed to be a prosecutor who hates to lose. He sought death in two cases in 1994, obtaining it both times. Dallas's death row population is about a quarter of Houston's.

Robert E. Colville 'I never had a lot of thought that ultimate revenge was necessary,' said Robert Colville of Pittsburgh, who rarely seeks the death penalty. About one defendant a year receives a death sentence in Allegheny County.

Gil Garcetti The trial of O. J. Simpson, who does not face the death penalty if convicted, is typical for prosecutor Gil Garcetti of Los Angeles County. Of about 2,000 homicides last year, Garcetti sought the death penalty 18 times, winning it in 6 cases. Harry Connick Sr. Harry Connick Sr., the long-time District Attorney of New Orleans, asks for the death penalty in every eligible homicide but is rarely successful. In the last five years, juries have given death only twice. Jack O'Malley Jack O'Malley has continued the practices of his predecessor, Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, by asking for death in a large majority eligible cases in Cook County. He obtains about seven death penalties a year.

Correction: August 6, 1995

The article on July 16 about District Attorney Lynne Abraham of Philadelphia referred incorrectly to Judge Albert F. Sabo. He still sits on the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, and is not retired.