Debate about capital punishment is swirling around the country as a federal court on Monday considers allowing California’s first execution in 23 years, Louisiana awaits an electrocution Friday and demonstrators march toward Atlanta.

The death penalty, outlawed in every other industrial country in the West, is embroiled anew in arguments that touch on legal, medical, moral, political and racial issues.

Emotions are strong on all sides — relatives of victims who want to see murderers put to death, prosecutors tired of repeated stays of executions, opponents who condemn state-sponsored killing.

“The death penalty is an issue that has a peculiar degree of sensitivity in the public mind, even though people don’t often see themselves as potential victims of murders or capital punishment,” Charles J. Ogletree, Harvard professor of criminal law and former Washington, D.C., public defender, said in an interview.

“It gets a visceral reaction. People are worried about crime, a seeming loss of control, a criminal system running amok, and they think the death penalty is an answer to crime.”

Every major study has concluded that the death penalty does not deter capital crimes, Ogletree said. Yet polls show most Americans still support capital punishment — a fact that politicians haven’t ignored in current elections — although most people say they would prefer life imprisonment without parole.

Former California Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who wrote a book last year about his agonizing decisions to grant or withhold clemency to prisoners facing death sentences, believes the public’s attitude toward capital punishment will change as the pace of executions increases.

“When they start gassing four people a day … after 20 weeks of that, people will be ready to get rid of it,” Brown said. “People will see the futility of the death penalty.

“People are not really in favor of the death penalty, but they’re opposed to the outrageous number of homicides in the country. They’re rightfully frightened and feel frustrated.”

More than 2,300 prisoners are on death rows around the country, and their numbers increase nearly every week as the appeals process blocks executions and more killers are convicted. Thirty-six states have capital punishment statutes.

Since the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing states to resume use of the death penalty, 125 people have been executed — the latest last Friday in Potosi, Mo., where Winford Stokes died by lethal injection for killing a woman 12 years ago.

The pace of executions Brown envisioned does not appear to be coming soon. Stokes was the fifth person executed this year. From 1984 through 1989, an average of 19 people a year were executed.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will hear arguments Monday on the execution of Robert Alton Harris, convicted of the 1978 murders of two San Diego teen-agers.

Harris, scheduled to die April 3 in San Quentin’s gas chamber, was granted a stay four days earlier by 9th Circuit Judge John Noonan. He said a lower-court judge may have erred in dismissing Harris’ claim of incompetent psychiatric assistance without holding a fact-finding hearing.

A psychiatric evaluation also is at the center of a case in New Orleans, where a man with borderline retardation, Dalton Prejean, who killed a state trooper in 1977, is scheduled to die in the electric chair Friday. A state judge last week rejected the latest attempt to save Prejean.