
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 6, 1990                   TAG: 9003062223
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/12   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RALEIGH, N.C.                                 LENGTH: Short

RULING SPARES MANY ON N.C. DEATH ROW

North Carolina's 84 death row inmates won't go free, but many of their lives could be spared under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning a key part of the state's death-penalty law, authorities said.

The court Monday set aside the death sentence of Dock McKoy Jr. for the 1984 murder of a deputy sheriff because, under the state law, the sentencing jury couldn't consider any mitigating factor, or one that might lessen the sentence, unless all 12 jurors agreed.

Writing for the court, Justice Thurgood Marshall said the unanimity requirement was unconstitutional. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor dissented in the 6-3 vote.

"The opinion itself is just very sweeping," said Gordon Widenhouse, assistant appellate defender for the state. "We're ecstatic."

"The decision does not mean that any death row inmates will go free, but it does mean that as many as 70 convicted murderers must have new sentencing hearings," Attorney General Lacy Thornburg said. "It means in each case that another jury will be required to again decide the appropriate punishment."

Eighty-two men are on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh and two women have been sentenced to die at the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women, also in Raleigh, said Bill Poston, a state Department of Correction spokesman.

The state attorney general's office believes the ruling should affect only defendants who received death sentences beginning in 1985, said Jim Coman, senior deputy attorney general.

by CNB