"I told John at the end of the case that he's not going to be executed," said Michael Coard. "He looked at me like I was crazy."

If history is any guide, Coard is probably right.

Lewis became the 222d resident of Pennsylvania's death row and the seventh man sent there for killing a Philadelphia police officer.

But since the death penalty was reinstated in the state in 1978, Pennsylvania has executed just three inmates, all of whom dropped their appeals and essentially volunteered to die.

The last execution took place in 1999, when Gary R. Heidnik was put to death for torturing and killing two Philadelphia women.

Even the Cassidy family seemed to acknowledge the unlikelihood of seeing Lewis put to death. Speaking for the family, Cassidy's brother-in-law, Anthony Conti, said, "The Lewis family lost their son."

"He will die in jail," Conti added.

Lewis, 23, now enters a lengthy appeals process in a state that has shown so much ambivalence toward the death penalty that some experts say the law exists in name only.

Coard said he would take the first step in that process - filing a post-sentence motion to the trial judge - within 10 days.

He says he believes the jury found Lewis guilty of first-degree murder based on "emotion and sympathy" for the Cassidy family, "not on law and facts."

First-degree murder requires the jury to find the shooting was "willful, deliberate and premeditated." Coard said his client should have been convicted of second-degree murder, which is not a capital offense.

At the start of the trial, Lewis admitted shooting Cassidy on Oct. 31, 2007, when the veteran police officer walked into a Dunkin' Donuts store that Lewis was robbing.

"Can a person under these circumstances - in one to two seconds - engage in a willful, deliberate, premeditated act?" Coard asked. "The prosecution's own witnesses said he was jittery, it happened spontaneously."

Coard said Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey Minehart allowed the jurors to see several pieces of evidence - including Cassidy's bloody shirt and badge - that may have inflamed their passions.

"I don't blame the jury. . . . They're normal people," Coard said. "That's why it's incumbent on the judge to be the gatekeeper, so they don't get that bloody shirt, that bloody badge."

Among other arguments, Coard said, he would object to prosecutors' having told the jury that Lewis showed no remorse. Coard said his client apologized for killing Cassidy in his confession and to television news reporters after his arrest.

Even if none of Lewis' appeals succeeds, the death penalty is still "more symbol than substance" in Pennsylvania, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

While the state has the country's fourth-largest death row, Pennsylvania has carried out one of the fewest number of executions. Texas, by contrast, has put to death nearly 450 inmates since 1976.

Dieter attributed the low number of executions here in part to a backlog of appeals.

"What happens is kind of a stalemate," he said. "Because so much is at stake, the law is complicated, and multiple reviews are tolerated."

Since 2000, at least 50 death sentences have been overturned, and other inmates have won new sentencing hearings or retrials based on errors in their original trials.

"Historically, our death-penalty practice in Pennsylvania has not been as good as it ought to be," said Jules Epstein, an associate professor at the Widener University School of Law who also handles death-penalty cases.

"A lot of the older cases are around for a reason," he said. "Mistakes were made, and it took a long time to find them."

Even if state and federal courts find no errors in Lewis' trial, the process is slow and deliberate, and could take years.

"It has given us the chance nationally to catch some cases where things went really wrong," Epstein said. "Slow is not necessarily bad."