WASHINGTON -- A divided Supreme Court yesterday refused to reconsider its ruling barring the death penalty for the crime of raping a child, despite having overlooked a recent federal law that authorized capital punishment for members of the military who rape a child.

The five-justice majority brushed aside calls to reopen the issue. On June 25, they ruled that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment for crimes that do not involve murder, and they overturned a Louisiana man's death sentence for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

In declaring these laws unconstitutional, the court's opinion said there was a "national consensus" against the use of the death penalty for crimes such as rape. The justices also said it was their "independent judgment" that the ultimate punishment should be reserved for persons who kill. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the opinion, and John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer agreed with it.

But shortly after the decision was handed down, a military blog noted that Congress and the President had updated the Code of Military Justice in 2006 and had authorized a death sentence for the rape of a child. This made for an embarrassing oversight. Neither the justices, nor their clerks, nor the government's lawyers had taken note of the child-rape provision in the military code. Once alerted to it, state lawyers for Louisiana, joined by the Bush administration, filed motions urging the court to reopen the case and revisit its ruling.

But the majority justices were disinclined to change their minds. The five justices issued a four-page opinion that rejected the request to reopen. Instead, they said a new footnote will be added to the decision in the case of Patrick Kennedy v. Louisiana. It takes note of the updated military code and ends by saying, "We find that the military penalty does not affect our reasoning or our conclusions."

Justice Kennedy pointed out that no member of the military is facing a death sentence for raping a child. "In any event, authorization of the death penalty in the military sphere does not indicate that the penalty is constitutional in the civilian context," he added.

The four dissenters made clear again that they thought the decision was mistaken. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted to rehear the case. Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said they continue to disagree with the court's ruling, but saw no need to rehear the matter.

"I am voting against the petition for rehearing because the views of the American people on the death penalty for child rape were, to tell the truth, irrelevant to the majority's decision in this case," Justice Scalia wrote.

No one has been executed for rape in the United States since 1964, and the court had ruled in 1977 that capital punishment for rape was unconstitutional. But that decision involved the rape of an adult woman.

Six states, including Louisiana, had enacted new death penalty laws in recent years that authorized the death penalty for the raping of a child. Patrick Kennedy, the Louisiana man, was the first person sentenced to die under the new child-rape laws, and the court took up his appeal.

Separately, the court said it will hear an environmental cleanup case from Arvin, Calif., near Bakersfield. The federal government paid $7.8 million, and California paid another $401,000, to clean up contamination from an abandoned storage facility for farm chemicals. The federal clean-up law calls for those costs to be paid by the polluters. But the law is not clear on how the costs are to be divided up.