For generations of North Carolina Democratic leaders, support for the death penalty was regarded as a political certainty -- like defending tobacco and singing the praises of pork barbecue.

But the announcement from Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, a death penalty supporter, that she backed a moratorium was another signal that views on public executions may be shifting.

Perdue, a likely Democratic candidate for governor in 2008, said she backed a moratorium while the courts, and maybe the legislature, work their way through a thicket regarding the role of physicians at executions.

While Perdue said she still supports the death penalty, some political observers saw her backing of a moratorium as way of reaching out to more liberal Democratic primary voters.

"This is a sign that the lieutenant governor may think Democratic politics on the death penalty are changing and moving more toward questioning of the death penalty, especially among liberal Democrats and African-Americans," said Gary Pearce, a veteran Democratic strategist. "It's more than politics. There is a genuine concern about innocence and prosecutorial zealousness and fairness. I think all of this is bubbling up."

The moratorium could become an issue in next year's Democratic primary for governor. State Treasurer Richard Moore, who is also a death penalty supporter, said he opposed a moratorium. Moore is considered a likely Democratic candidate for governor.

"Calling for a moratorium, in my view," Moore said, "is simply a way of backing into that [anti-death penalty] debate."

In socially conservative North Carolina, Democrats have dominated the governor's mansion by campaigning as tough on crime and willing to see murderers executed. Four-term Gov. Jim Hunt was first elected with commercials showing him clanging shut jailhouse doors. Two-term Gov. Mike Easley was elected as pistol-packing former local prosecutor who took on Latin American drug gangs. Both men rarely commuted death sentences.

They were responding to the voters. Sixty-four percent of North Carolinians support executions, according to a statewide poll conducted by Elon University in November 2005.

But there are indications that attitudes may be changing. Three years ago, the Democratic-controlled state Senate passed a death penalty moratorium, only to see the measure die in the House. Newly elected House Speaker Joe Hackney is one of the House's leading death penalty critics.

Before stepping down as chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Beverly Lake Jr., a Republican, pushed for the creation of a commission to examine claims of innocence.

While the South has been a stronghold for the death penalty, there have been cracks in that support. Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, before he left office, supported moratoriums. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is a death penalty opponent.

Perdue's views on the death penalty appear to have evolved.

As a state legislator in 1995, she expressed concern that doing away with the gas chamber would lessen the deterrent value of the death penalty.

"I think we should make it painful and torturous," Perdue told The Charlotte Observer.

Stephen Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, said Perdue, as presiding officer of the Senate, helped moratorium backers when the issue was debated in the Senate in 2003.

"I believe she is reflecting the majority view of North Carolinians, who supported the death penalty initially," Dear said, "but when they started hearing about innocent people on death row and racially biased sentences realized the system is not what they thought it was."

Moore said his views on the death penalty were shaped, in part, by his stint as a federal prosecutor and as Hunt's secretary of crime control and public safety.

"I've had to tell a law enforcement official's wife that he was not coming home that night," Moore said. "Often left out of the debate is how the victim and their family feels about these criminals."