The hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons made a rare appearance at City Hall yesterday, but there was no rap or poetry jam on the agenda.

The founder of Def Jam Records, who is widely credited with helping to make a mainstream art form of what was once street music, Mr. Simmons joined a coalition of politicians and activists in denouncing pending legislation in Albany to reinstate the death penalty. The coalition accused Albany of trying to rush through a “quick fix” to get the death penalty back on the books after the state Court of Appeals struck it down as unconstitutional in June.

“Over 300 groups are organized today with one simple purpose: to say to Albany, ‘We are opposed to your quick fix to reinstate the death penalty. It is wrong and it must not happen,'” Andrew Cuomo said. His father was unseated in 1994 by Governor Pataki in a race in which the death penalty was a prominent issue. The younger Cuomo, who served as President Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development, unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to run against Mr. Pataki in 2002.

“The current proposal to reinstate the death penalty is worse, in my opinion, than the original law in ’95 because it does not take into consideration at all, all of the progress and all of the changes since then,” Mr. Cuomo said, standing on the steps of City Hall .”Over the past decade we’ve learned a lot.”

On June 24, the state’s highest court declared the law’s sentencing provision unconstitutional, saying it could place improper pressure on jurors to return a sentence of death. Under the law, jurors could choose between a death sentence and a sentence of life in prison without parole, but if they deadlocked the convict won the possibility of parole. The unexpected ruling, which stemmed from a case involving a murderer convicted on Long Island, has become a rallying cry for longtime death penalty opponents, who view it as providing an opportunity to repeal the law altogether.

The state Legislature has not yet come to agreement on retooling the law. The Republican-controlled Senate has passed a bill, but the Democrat controlled Assembly has not yet taken up the measure. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver supported capital punishment in 1995, but he is letting the issue sit now and says he will take no action until hearings are held. Many say there is not enough support in Mr. Silver’s conference to lift the moratorium and restore the death penalty.

Calls for a “fix,” however, have grown louder among advocates of capital punishment since the fatal shooting of two New York City police officers in Flatbush last month.

Mr. Pataki’s proposal would give jurors the option of sentencing a murderer to life imprisonment with parole but it would make life-without-parole the default sentence in the event of a stalemate. But opponents on hand yesterday said capital punishment is barbaric and New York should be leading the nation in abandoning it. They argued that too many people are wrongly convicted under a flawed criminal-justice system, that the death penalty does not serve as an effective deterrent, and that New York’s death penalty has been a failure since it was restored nearly a decade ago.

Mr. Simmons, who was wearing baggy jeans and a loose-fitting tan jacket, said that until the state could resurrect a life after discovering that it had mistakenly executed the wrong person, he would not support capital punishment.

Standing in a crowd of people wearing bright yellow buttons that read “Execute Justice, Not People,” the Queens native called the death penalty an “unjust, racist, and ineffectual law” and said there was nothing the legislature could do to change that.

Others, including the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, and Assemblyman Keith Wright of Manhattan, argued that members of minority groups are twice as likely to be executed and that it costs the state less to keep criminals in prison than to administer an execution.

The state, they said, has spent $170 million since 1995 without a single execution. They also said there has been a falling off of public support for the death penalty, now that the state has a provision for “mandatory life in prison without parole.”

In an impassioned denouncement, met with cheers of approval, Council Member Margarita Lopez called capital punishment “nothing else than brutality institutionalized by the state.” Ms. Lopez, a Democrat of Manhattan, has a resolution pending in the council in opposition to lifting the moratorium.

Mr. Wright, who wrote a bill to repeal the death penalty when it was reinstated in 1995, was one of a few speakers who chided Mr. Pataki for rushing on the current measure while other bills move like molasses.