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A New York City man who was sentenced to be executed for the murder of two undercover police officers in 2003 — and who made headlines once again this week after it was revealed he impregnated one of his prison guards — was found by a judge on Thursday not to be mentally retarded and therefore eligible to be put to death.

The case is one of the more notorious in recent criminal history. In March 2003, Ronell Wilson shot and killed two undercover detectives — James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews — during a gun-buy operation on Staten Island that went tragically wrong.

A federal jury found him guilty and handed down the first death sentence by a federal jury in the city in more than half a century. An appeals court upheld the conviction but suspended the death penalty, saying the prosecution unfairly prejudiced the jury during sentencing. That meant the question of whether Mr. Wilson would face the death penalty or would face life in prison would have to be heard before a new jury.

Lawyers for Mr. Wilson sought to block the prospect that he could receive another death sentence by arguing that he was mentally incompetent. But Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of United States District Court in Brooklyn ruled that Mr. Wilson was not mentally retarded, either at the time he committed the crime or now.

The 55-page ruling did not mention the latest controversy surrounding Mr. Wilson, the allegation that he had a sexual affair with one of his prison guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and that she is now eight months pregnant with his child. The guard, Nancy Gonzalez, 29, was arraigned in federal court on Tuesday on charges of sexual abuse of a person in custody, because an inmate cannot legally consent to sex. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

During his trial, Mr. Wilson, faced with the death penalty, let it be known that he did not want to leave this world childless, writing to another inmate, "I just need a baby before thiz pigz try to take my life."

If he had been found to be retarded, a death penalty ruling would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments," as well as the Federal Death Penalty Act passed by Congress in 1988 and amended in 1994 that states a "sentence of death shall not be carried out upon a person who is mentally retarded."

The issue of whether inferior mental capacity should stop someone from being sentenced to death has long been one of the most fraught issues surrounding the death penalty. On June 20, 2002, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling ending the execution of those with intellectual disability.

Judge Garaufis noted that over the course of his life, Mr. Wilson had been issued nine I.Q. tests. The methods of the testing varied, but Judge Garaufis found that because eight of those tests showed him to be at least three points above the benchmark for legal retardation, which is 70, Mr. Wilson was not retarded. In addition to the I.Q. tests, Judge Garaufis said that he based his ruling on the opinions of the clinicians who administered the tests."The clinical judgments of Wilson's test administrators support the court's analysis," he wrote. "And most of them believed his observed scores represented an underestimate of his true intelligence."

But he noted that the ruling did not mean that Mr. Wilson would ultimately face execution for his crimes. "This does not mean that he will receive — or deserve to receive — the death penalty," he wrote. "But only that any such penalty would not violate the Federal Death penalty Act or the Eighth Amendment."