WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s former second-ranking official offered effusive praise yesterday for many of the U.S. attorneys fired in a shake-up last year.

In just one example, a former deputy attorney general, James Comey, said the department decided to scrap a recommendation to seek the death penalty in an Arizona case after the top federal prosecutor there convincingly argued that sparing the man would be in the interests of justice.

The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton, was among eight U.S. attorneys whose dismissals have put the Bush White House and Attorney General Gonzales on the defensive, with Congress subpoenaing records and alleging that they were fired for partisan reasons.

In Mr. Charlton’s case, Justice Department even alleged insubordination, saying his refusal to follow the recommendations of Justice headquarters in death penalty cases. But Mr. Comey, the deputy attorney general between 2003 and 2005, said in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that he welcomed the input that Mr. Charlton and other prosecutors offered in death cases, and often found their arguments to be compelling.

“I would never not only not discourage that kind of thing, I would encourage it,” Mr. Comey said. “Because I needed to hear from the people in the field who knew these cases, because I’m trying to make these decisions off a notebook in Washington, D.C., and I can’t feel the pain of the victim’s families. And he can. And you always want that input.”

Mr. Comey recalled an instance where Mr. Charlton “turned me around” on a particular case by citing concerns of family members of the victim that a sentence of death would subject them to further trauma.

“My recollection is I changed my recommendation,” Mr. Comey said, “and I think I convinced [then-Attorney General] Ashcroft to turn around on it.”

In his testimony, Mr. Comey had often-effusive praise for many of the other seven U.S. attorneys that the administration axed last year, and offered assessments of their performance that contrasted sharply with the reasons offered by the Justice Department for their dismissal.

He said he admired many of them for their dedication to crime-fighting, their integrity, and their management skills.

Mr. Comey said he was once asked by D. Kyle Sampson — who as chief of staff to Mr. Gonzales helped orchestrated the firings — to identify weak-performing U.S. attorneys.

Mr. Comey said only one of the names that he gave to Mr. Sampson — a former San Francisco U.S. attorney, Kevin Ryan — ended up on the final list of prosecutors who were dismissed.

Mr. Ryan faced “management challenges” but Mr. Comey said the other fired prosecutors were far and way good public servants.

A former U.S. attorney in Nevada, Dan Bogden, was “straight as a Nevada highway and a fired-up guy” who “made tremendous strides on violent crime.”

John McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle, “was one of my favorites” in part because he pushed new technology to enhance information-sharing between state and federal crime-fighters. Justice officials have said Mr. McKay was fired in part for pursuing that very same technology project.

He acknowledged that he once had meetings with Carol Lam, the former U.S. attorney in San Diego, because her district was lagging in the number of gun prosecutions it was pursuing. But he said her performance did not justify her being fired, and he considered her to be effective. “My interactions with her were always positive,” he said.