HARRISBURG -- State Sen. Jim Ferlo hopes that a new report castigating Pennsylvania's death penalty procedures will force a public hearing on his bill to impose a two-year moratorium on executions in the state.

The American Bar Association yesterday released a two-year study that claims there are "substantial shortcomings" in the way the state handles death penalty cases, a situation that could increase the chances of "not adequately protecting against the wrongful conviction of innocent people."

"This bar association report should be a major impetus to push my bill along," said the Highland Park Democrat. "When a major pronouncement from such a prestigious group of national and Pennsylvania trial lawyers comes along, it should help garner support for the bill."

Mr. Ferlo's bill for a two-year moratorium on executions, Senate Bill 850, has been sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee but so far there's been no hearing. One reason could be that Gov. Ed Rendell, a former Philadelphia district attorney, doesn't support a moratorium. He has signed numerous death warrants for convicted killers in his nearly five years as governor.

Mr. Rendell has said in the past that there hasn't been an execution in Pennsylvania since 1999. That's when Gary Heidnik, a torture-killer from Philadelphia, stopped appealing his conviction and was executed. With eight years elapsing without an execution, he thinks Pennsylvania already has a de facto moratorium.

Mr. Ferlo and Mr. Rendell are urban Democrats and generally agree on policy issues, but not on the death penalty. "I would like to see the governor change his position and take to heart the analysis of his own peer group," meaning the bar association, Mr. Ferlo said.

Since 1997, the bar association has urged a halt to executions in the 50 states "until fairness and accuracy -- that is, due process -- are assured in death penalty cases."

The new bar association report was done by a group of legal experts, mostly from southeastern Pennsylvania. It was chaired by Villanova Law School Professor Anne Bowen Poulin.

The report maintains that indigent defendants aren't assured by counties or the state of funding for adequate legal representation; recommends that the state change its policy of not providing funds for lawyers for indigent defendants; and calls for police departments or coroners to stop throwing away biological and DNA evidence that could help overturn a conviction.

The new bar association national president, H. Thomas Wells Jr. of Alabama, urged Mr. Rendell to appoint his own panel of experts to study whether murder defendants are treated equally and fairly by the criminal justice system and whether many of them, especially poor, black, urban males, wind up on death row because they can't afford to hire proper counsel and investigators.

"The governor will review the suggestions and take them under consideration,'' said Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo.