ALBANY — The slaying of a 29-year-old state trooper engaged in a manhunt that ended in flames at a farmhouse in the northern Catskills has upended Governor Spitzer’s political agenda, which has been abruptly overshadowed by Senate Republican efforts to revive the state’s death penalty.

A single suspect, Travis Trim, 23, is alleged to have shot three state officers, including one fatally in the head, and was holed up in a house in a rural hamlet near Margaretville in Delaware County. After a standoff that lasted hours and involved exchanges of gunfire, the house erupted in flames when SWAT teams began an assault with an armored vehicle, the Associated Press reported. Police last night recovered a charred body holding a rifle, according to the AP.

David Brinkerhoff, a member of the SWAT-like Mobile Response Team, was shot to death while trying to search the farm in the morning and another trooper accompanying him was wounded in the left arm.

Less than four hours later, the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, standing with more than a dozen of his colleagues at a hastily-arranged press conference, called on Mr. Spitzer to stop “wandering” around the state and get behind their efforts to restore the state’s death penalty for the killing of police officers and terrorists.

The governor, whose relationship with Mr. Bruno has deteriorated in recent weeks, suggested the legislative leader was trying to politicize a tragic event. The governor’s spokesman indicated, however, that his administration would take up the death penalty issue at a later period.

“On this day at this particular moment, I think it is best to simply reflect on the extraordinary service and sacrifice of our troopers and their families,” Mr. Spitzer said. “I know that here in the capital there’s an ongoing debate over legislative initiatives and politics. Now is not the moment for that debate. There will be much time for that later. Right now, we should be respectful of what has happened.”

Republicans are set to pass a bill on Monday that would revive the death penalty in the state for the first time since 2004, when the state’s highest court found the state’s jury instruction statute to be unconstitutionally biased against defendants, effectively putting a freeze on capital punishment. The legislation would correct the statute and bring back the death penalty in a narrower form than existed when it was reinstated under Governor Pataki, being reserved this time only for the killing of police officers, prison guards, and terrorists. No prisoners were executed after Mr. Pataki reinstated the death penalty.

Assembly Democrats, which responded to yesterday’s violence with calls for stricter gun laws, are opposing the bill.

Saying it was “open season on law enforcement people,” Mr. Bruno said has was “asking the governor to use his considerable influence with the Assembly” to persuade the chamber to pass the Senate’s legislation.

Mr. Spitzer started the day in Long Island on the second leg of his barnstorming tour intended to pressure Senate Republicans into approving an overhaul of the state’s campaign finance laws, an issue that the governor has used to try to paint Republicans as enemies of positive change.

By the afternoon, Mr. Spitzer had cancelled his plans.

Republicans said they weren’t taking advantage of bloodshed to press a political agenda but were acting with urgency to deter more murders after a string of police shootings in recent months.

“I think the people of the state of New York should inform him what his priorities should be, and it’s definitely not campaign finance and some of the other issues that he’s doing,” the bill’s sponsor, Martin Golden, a representative of Brooklyn, said.

Mr. Brinkerhoff is the second member of his unit to die in a manhunt in seven months and, according to lawmakers, the 10th trooper or police officer killed in the line of duty in the last year and a half.

The manhunt began on Tuesday when a state trooper pulled over Trim on a routine traffic stop. He was reportedly driving a stolen minivan. The trooper was shot in the chest, but was protected by a bullet-proof vest.

Mr. Spitzer has moderated his position on the death penalty since entering politics in 1994, when he first ran for attorney general. During his 1994 and 1998 campaigns, he distinguished himself from many in his party by saying he supported capital punishment. In the 2006 governor’s race, Mr. Spitzer qualified his support, saying he would seek to revive the state death penalty for cop killers, terrorists, and serial killers.

At the time of the Court of Appeals ruling on New York’s death penalty law, polls showed that voters favored capital punishment for murders but were less supportive of the death penalty than the rest of the country. A March 2003 Quinnipiac University poll found that 57% of voters favor the penalty, compared with the national average of 64%.

Thirty-eight states, including New York, have death penalty statutes. If the bill passes, New York would be the first state to permit capital punishment in such a narrow form.