BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Baltimore County prosecutors are still seeking the death penalty for the prisoner accused of strangling another inmate aboard a prison bus, despite a temporary ban on executions in the state.

Kevin Gregory Johns, 25, whose trial opens in Harford County on Monday, is charged with strangling Philip Eugene Parker on a prison bus carrying dozens of inmates from Hagerstown to Baltimore on Feb. 2, 2005.

Parker, 20, had testified on Johns’ behalf in a 2004 case in which Johns was convicted of killing his 16-year-old cellmate.

Johns’ attorneys had tried to keep prosecutors from seeking the death penalty because of a Maryland Court of Appeals ruling in December 2006 halting executions until the lethal injection process could be reviewed and refined.

“There’s a de facto moratorium because there’s no method of execution, but that doesn’t keep prosecutors from seeking the death penalty,” said Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions.

“The death penalty is still on the books in the state of Maryland,” Harford Circuit Judge Emery Plitt said. “It is merely the procedural aspects of it which are, in practical terms, ‘on hold.’ ”

Johns’ attorneys have entered a plea of “not criminally responsible” by reason of insanity. Using doctors’ evaluations and medical records, the attorneys appeared to be making a case that extensive lead poisoning diminished Johns’ mental abilities.

“That will be one small part of it,” said Harry Trainor, an Annapolis lawyer representing Johns. “It’s up to the state to show what happened on that bus, and we will go forward with evidence of any mental defect or disorder he was suffering from at the relevant time.”

Johns, who also had been convicted in 2002 of killing his uncle, claimed that Satan played a part in both of his previous murders.

 He wrote Plitt a letter in July 2006 disavowing his lawyers, then insisting in a lengthy postscript that he would never get a fair trial in Harford County because of his background.

The judge granted a request to move the trial from Baltimore County to Harford.

Five prisoners await execution in Maryland.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com