TALLAHASSEE -- A month before the scheduled execution of a Death Row veteran, his lawyer on Monday told the state Supreme Court that there are two reasons that it should grant a stay.

The first involves a legal question that the high court first grappled with after the state's capital punishment law was put on the books nearly 30 years ago: When juries recommend life sentences, can judges still condemn convicted killers to death?

In Florida, juries in capital cases issue advisory sentences that judges must give great weight to -- but it's the judge who decides the sentence.

The second issue rests on a U.S. Supreme Court decision made less than a year ago in an unrelated New Jersey case that lawyer Todd Scher said could affect how the death penalty works in Florida.

Scher represents Gregory Mills, 43, who faces lethal injection May 2 for fatally shooting James Wright, 70.

Only 10 of the 371 people on Florida's Death Row have been there longer than Mills, who broke into Wright's Sanford home with Vincent Ashley on May 25, 1979.

When the victim went to investigate noises, Mills shot him.

The jury that convicted Mills recommended a life sentence, knowing that Ashley received immunity in exchange for his testimony.

But the trial judge sentenced Mills to death.

That sentence was originally upheld by Florida's high court in 1985, despite a 1975 ruling in which it had said judges must abide by jury recommendations for life in prison unless ``no reasonable person'' would agree with the jury recommendation.

A few years after Florida's high court upheld Mills' death sentence, it started overturning death sentences in cases where juries had recommended life.

Last September, all seven justices voted to overturn a death sentence in an unrelated case where the jury had voted 7-5 to recommend a life sentence.

Kenneth Nunnelley, an assistant attorney general defending Mills' death sentence, told the justices the question was long settled in Mills' case and that they should not revisit the issue.

Also on Monday, the justices heard an appeal from condemned killer James Card, who has been on Death Row since February 1982 for murdering a Panama City woman in June 1981.

Card was resentenced to death after the first death sentence was overturned by a trial judge on his second appeal.

The second death sentence, like all death sentences, must be reviewed by Florida's high court, and that first automatic appeal brought the case to the Supreme Court on Monday.

Card, 54, was condemned for the murder of Janice Franklin, 41, who owned a Western Union office and had helped Card in the past.