[laughter] Well, now that you ask about
McKoy, and I don't know how much we need to get into
this for anyone who may hear this later, but just a little history on
that. The United States Supreme Court in the
Mills
case, which was a case out of Maryland, in effect, said the instructions
could be taken to mean that a juror who felt there was somethign
mitigating, would not be able to consider that in deciding whether a
person should get the life or death. And so they sent it back. The
question was, whether that case applied to North Carolina law. And, to
me there was just no doubt that the
Mills case, which
was a United States Supreme Court case, did apply to North Carolina,
because North Carolina instructions didn't leave any doubt. They said
that each juror had to find each mitigating circumstance unanimously so
it was very clear to me that the case did apply. So I dissented to the
decisions which this court handed down saying that it did not apply.
And, as you know, we had a lot of those cases, and eventually the
Supreme Court of the United States agreed that it did apply. And that
was the
McKoy case, of course, which said that. So
then we had the question then of whether it was subject to what we call
harmless error, and we said, yes, it is, so then of the cases that had
come up, we had to first see if there was error, and then if there was
error, was it harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. And if we couldn't
find that we'd have to send it back for a new sentencing hearing. And so
that's what we did. Obviously, I feel that — not I feel, everybody
knows — we've got to comply with the decisions of
the United States Supreme Court as far as meeting their requirements
Page 45 under the law. And so it was just a question of
whether our interpretation was correct or not. That's sort of the way
that went.