In the Matter of Natalie Spires Paine ( 2023 )

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to modification resulting from motions for reconsideration under Supreme Court
Rule 27, the Court’s reconsideration, and editorial revisions by the Reporter of Decisions. The version of the
opinion published in the Advance Sheets for the Georgia Reports, designated as the “Final Copy,” will replace any
prior version on the Court’s website and docket. A bound volume of the Georgia Reports will contain the final and
official text of the opinion.
In the Supreme Court of Georgia
Decided: April 18, 2023
S23Y0037. IN THE MATTER OF NATALIE SPIRES PAINE.
PER CURIAM.
This disciplinary matter relates to allegations made against
Natalie Spires Paine (State Bar No. 312524) related to her
involvement in a double-murder case in 2018 as the District
Attorney of the Augusta Judicial Circuit and as the lead prosecutor
in that case. The State Disciplinary Board filed a grievance on its
own motion, see Rule 4-203 (2), alleging that Paine violated Rules
3.4 (g) (using methods of obtaining evidence that violate legal rights
of opposing party or counsel); 4.2 (knowingly communicating with a
person represented by counsel); 8.1 (a) (knowingly making false
statements of material facts in connection with a disciplinary
matter); and 8.4 (a) (1) (violating or knowingly attempting to violate
rules, knowingly assisting or inducing another to do so, or doing so
through acts of another) of the Georgia Rules of Professional
Conduct found in Bar Rule 4-102 (d).1
Special Master Patrick H. Head held an evidentiary hearing on
the matter and found that the State failed to prove that Paine
violated any rules and recommended that no discipline be imposed.
The Bar filed exceptions to, and requested review of, the Special
Master’s report and recommendation. On review, the State
Disciplinary Review Board concluded that some of the Special
Master’s findings were clearly erroneous and that Paine violated
Rules 3.4 (g) and 8.1 (a). The Review Board recommended that a
1
Rule 3.4 says: A lawyer shall not . . . (g) use methods of obtaining
evidence that violate the legal rights of the opposing party or counsel.” Rule
4.2 (a) says: “A lawyer who is representing a client in a matter shall not
communicate about the subject of the representation with a person the lawyer
knows to be represented by another lawyer in the matter, unless the lawyer
has the consent of the other lawyer or is authorized to do so by law or court
order.” Rule 8.1 says: “An applicant for admission to the bar, or a lawyer in
connection with a bar admission application or in connection with a
disciplinary matter, shall not: (a) knowingly make a false statement of
material fact.” And Rule 8.4 (a) says: “It shall be a violation of the Georgia
Rules of Professional Conduct for a lawyer to: (1) violate or knowingly attempt
to violate the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, knowingly assist or
induce another to do so, or do so through the acts of another.”
The maximum penalty for a violation of Rules 3.4 (g), 4.2, and 8.1 is
disbarment. Rule 8.4 provides that “[t]he maximum penalty for a violation of
Rule 8.4 (a) (1) is the maximum penalty for the specific Rule violated.”
2
six-month suspension be imposed.
As explained below, we reject the Review Board’s conclusions,
which failed to give appropriate deference to the Special Master’s
findings. Applying the appropriate standard of review ourselves, we
defer to the Special Master’s fact-findings—which are not clearly
erroneous—and we agree with the Special Master that no discipline
is warranted.
1. Evidence Presented at the Hearing Before the Special Master
The Bar has the burden of proving each element of alleged rule
violations by clear and convincing evidence. See Bar Rule 4-221.2.
At the hearing before the Special Master, the following evidence was
presented.
Paine testified as follows. She was the lead prosecutor in a case
against William Krepps, Vaughn Verdi, and another defendant for
the murder of two men. Lieutenant Lucas Grant from the Richmond
County Sheriff’s Office was the lead investigator. On February 27,
2018, Krepps and Verdi were transported from the jail to the
Richmond County Sheriff Office’s Criminal Investigation Division
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(“CID”). Lt. Grant told Paine that morning that the men were going
to be transported. He asked Paine to tell the defendants’ lawyers
about their transportation to the CID and to go to the CID herself,
both of which she did.2
While at the CID, both defendants met with their attorneys
privately in a CID interview room. Paine knew about Krepps’s
meeting with his attorney because at some point during the meeting,
she knocked on the door and “stuck [her] head in the interview room”
to speak to the attorney. Both attorney-client meetings were
recorded “by audio and visual means,” and the recordings were
included within the evidence provided to the DA’s office by the
Sheriff’s Office, which Paine burned onto 107 compact discs (CDs).
She then distributed copies of the CDs to the parties. She did not,
2 In her answer to the formal complaint, Paine admitted that Krepps’s
attorney told her that there was no need to move Krepps to the CID because
he did not want to talk with law enforcement. Before the special master, Paine
testified that she did not remember this conversation. However, after she was
shown her answer to the formal complaint, she acknowledged the admission.
As we explain in footnote 5 below, the Review Board pointed to this
inconsistency in concluding that Paine had made a false statement of material
fact, even though this statement was not the basis for the violation of Rule 8.1
alleged in the formal complaint (Count III), and the Special Master expressly
found that this inconsistency had “little evidentiary value.”
4
however, watch the CDs before distributing them. To the contrary,
she did not know that recordings of the attorney-client meetings
were on the CDs until Verdi filed on September 21 a motion to,
among other things, dismiss the indictment based on the recording
of his private attorney-client conversation, at which point members
of the media began calling Paine.3
As to whether she knew that interviews that were held in the
CID were being recorded, Paine testified as follows. It was her
understanding that it was the “common procedure” to record “all the
conversations in the CID rooms.” She had viewed “thousands of
interviews” recorded in the CID interview rooms, and each of those
recordings “starts before the person walks into the room, and it
doesn’t end until after the person has been led out of the room.” She
had also previously watched interrogations conducted in the CID
interview rooms on a live monitor at the CID. She assumed
everyone knew the CID interview rooms were recorded and that if
3 The trial court denied the motion to dismiss, but suppressed the
attorney-client recordings, which Paine agreed was appropriate.
5
attorneys wanted to have a private conversation with their clients,
“they would indicate that or that the Sheriff’s Office would tell them,
you know, we’re recording.” At the time Krepps and Verdi met with
their attorneys in the interview rooms, Paine did not know that the
software used to make the recordings did not have the ability to
mute the recording. After Paine discovered that privileged attorney-
client conversations had been recorded, she demanded that a new
recording system be installed to prevent that from happening again,
and she spent $40,000 of the DA’s budget for the new system.
Lt. Grant testified as follows. He instructed that Krepps and
Verdi be brought to the CID on February 27, and Paine did not direct
or influence that decision. In fact, if Paine had told him not to
transport Krepps, he “still would’ve transported [the defendant]”
because Paine was “not [his] boss.” When attorneys met with clients
in the CID rooms, the rooms were “visually monitor[ed], only
visually, [to ensure that] no contraband is being passed by the
attorney or the defendant is not trying to harm the attorney or vice
versa.” There was not a way to stop the audio recording of the CID
6
interview rooms while still visually recording the room, but Lt.
Grant believed that the Sheriff’s Office had a protocol in place to
ensure that any privileged communications that were recorded were
deleted—but they obviously “dropped the ball” as to Krepps’s and
Verdi’s recordings.
Finally, Krepps’s attorney testified that before she met with
Krepps in the CID interview room, she asked Lt. Grant if the
meeting was being recorded, “and he motioned to somebody . . . to
cut the audio,” so the attorney “made the assumption that we were
being visually watched, but not listened to.”
The Bar’s complaint alleged four counts of rule violations based
on the conduct described above. We address each count below,
explaining the allegation, as well as the relevant findings and
conclusions of the Special Master and of the Review Board.
2. Count I
Count I of the complaint alleged that Paine violated Rule 3.4
(g), which prohibits a lawyer from “us[ing] methods of obtaining
evidence that violate the legal rights of the opposing party or
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counsel,” when she “1) participated in the recording of the . . .
meeting[s]; 2) obtained evidence in violation of the law and the
United States and Georgia Constitutions; 3) obtained the recordings
of the . . . meeting[s]; 4) distributed the recordings of the . . .
meeting[s] . . . to all counsel in the Case; and 5) prosecuted [the co-
defendants] using evidence that [she] knew or should have known
had been obtained in violation of the law and the United States and
Georgia Constitutions.”
As to Count 1, the Special Master found that although Paine
and defense counsel “were aware that the interview rooms at CID
were recorded, both audio and video,” they were “also under the
mistaken belief that the audio could be stopped.” The Special
Master also found that “[t]here was no evidence presented that
[Paine] ‘invited criminal defense counsel to meet with their clients
in a CID interview room’” and “nothing in the evidence to suggest
that [Paine] knew attorney-client conversations were being
recorded.” As to the CDs containing the meeting recordings, the
Special Master found that Paine “did not look at any of the CDs to
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review the content, and was not aware that any of the CDs contained
the audio recordings of the attorney-client conversations.” The
Special Master further explained that although Paine copied and
distributed the recordings, “there is nothing in the rule that
prohibits the distribution of illegally obtained evidence,” and “[e]ven
if there were, the special master finds from the evidence that [Paine]
did not knowingly do so” since she was “not aware that she was
distributing the conversations of the attorneys with their clients.”
The Special Master also found that “[t]here was no evidence
presented that [Paine] ever used any unlawfully or illegally
obtained evidence.” (Emphasis in original.) Finally, the Special
Master found that Paine, “though under no obligation to do so under
Rule 3.4 (g), immediately took steps to ensure no future attorney-
client conversations would be recorded” once she learned of the
recordings. Based on these findings, the Special Master concluded
that the Bar failed to prove that Paine violated Rule 3.4.
The Review Board concluded that the Special Master’s finding
that “[t]here is nothing in the evidence to suggest that [Paine] knew
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attorney-client conversations were being recorded” was “clearly
erroneous as there was evidence upon which findings of fact could
have been drawn to support a violation.” The Review Board
concluded that Paine “knew all conversations in the CID interview
room were uniformly and consistently recorded” and she knew that
Krepps met with his attorney in a CID interview room. Thus, the
Review Board concluded that Paine “had a duty to assure that the
[attorney-client meetings] were not part of any CDs delivered to the
parties,” but failed to do so.
3. Count II
Count II alleged that Paine violated Rule 4.2, which forbids a
lawyer from “communicat[ing] about the subject matter of [a]
representation with a person the lawyer knows to be represented by
another lawyer in the matter, unless the lawyer has the consent of
the other lawyer or is authorized to do so by law or court order,”
when she “continued interrogations of [the co-defendants] after
knowing that each was represented by counsel and when she
continued prosecuting [the co-defendants] using testimony obtained
10
in the interrogations.”
The Special Master concluded that “[n]o evidence; none; zero;
not even one scintilla of evidence was presented to support the
allegation” of Count II that Paine violated Rule 4.2. The Review
Board agreed with the Special Master that the Bar did not submit
any evidence in support of this claim.
4. Count III
Count III alleged that Paine violated Rule 8.1 (a), which
prohibits a lawyer from “knowingly mak[ing] a false statement of
material fact” “in connection with a disciplinary matter,” when she
“stated in a grievance response dated May 20, 2019, that she had no
knowledge of the recordings of privileged conversations until the
media started calling on September 28, 2018, when in fact [she] was
aware of the recordings prior to [that date],” and when she “stated,
through counsel, in a letter to . . . the State Disciplinary Board, dated
November 4, 2019, that [she] was not involved in any manner with
the transport of [the defendants] to [the sheriff’s office], when in fact,
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[she] had prior knowledge of the transport and its purpose.”4
The Special Master found that although Paine testified that
she had “reviewed ‘thousands of hours of interviews’ at CID, there
was no evidence presented by the State Bar that any of those
4 The Bar’s formal complaint does not quote either of the allegedly false
statements, but Paine’s May 20 grievance response and November 4 letter to
the State Disciplinary Board were introduced at the hearing before the Special
Master. In the May 20 response, Paine stated that she was surprised when
she arrived at a superior court hearing about these recordings in the criminal
case and was:
interrogated as if I had engaged in some sort of conspiracy to trick
the defendants into talking to their lawyers on camera so that I
could surreptitiously record them talking. What they thought I
possibly had to gain from this is still a mystery. I had no
knowledge about the existence of the recordings or the camera
system’s operation when the interviews [were conducted] in
February 2018. . . . I didn’t know the recording(s) existed until the
media started calling on September 28, 2018.
At the hearing before the Special Master, Paine was questioned about her
statement, “I had no knowledge about the existence of the recordings or the
camera system’s operation when the interviews [were conducted] in February.”
In the November 4 response, Paine stated through counsel:
District Attorney Paine was not a driving force, or any force in the
law enforcement officer’s decision to transport/speak with any of
these represented individuals. District Attorney Paine was not
involved, in any manner, with this unilateral law enforcement
officer’s conduct.
And later in the response, she stated:
As explained above, District Attorney Paine had absolutely
nothing to do with the transport or planned interrogation of these
represented parties as same was facilitated, orchestrated, initiated
and executed by law enforcement before District Attorney Paine
became aware of the issue.
Paine was not questioned about any statements from the November 4 letter
response at the hearing before the Special Master.
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interviews were between an attorney and a client” and that “[t]he
State Bar has presented no evidence to refute [Paine’s] claim
regarding her lack of knowledge of the attorney-client conversations
being recorded.” (Emphasis in original.) The Special Master further
found that “the evidence of [Paine’s] conduct after learning that the
attorney-client conversations had been recorded[] is consistent with
and supportive of her testimony; she did not previously know
attorney-client conversations were being recorded.”
As to the second allegedly false statement, the Special Master
found that despite Paine’s “mere knowledge of the transport . . . the
evidence presented through the testimony of [Paine] and Lt. Grant
is clear and convincing that [Paine] had no involvement in the
transportation of the defendants from the jail to the CID.” The
Special Master also credited Lt. Grant’s testimony that he would
have transported the defendants even if Paine told him not to.
Therefore, the Special Master found that Paine’s “statements in
these two instances were in fact true, based upon the evidence
13
presented.”5
The Review Board concluded that “there are facts in the record
that support a finding of a violation of 8.1 (a) and therefore finds the
determination by the Special Master that there were no such facts
is clearly erroneous.” Specifically, the Review Board found that
because Paine reviewed “thousands of hours” of recorded CID
interviews and knew that Krepps was taken to CID and met with
Krepps’s attorney in the interview room, Paine’s statement that she
was unaware attorney-client conversations were recorded was false.
The Review Board did not appear to address the second allegedly
false statement.6
5 The Special Master also noted the discrepancy between Paine’s
testimony that she did not remember Krepps’s attorney telling her that Krepps
did not want to make a statement and her admission that Krepps’s attorney
did tell her this. The Special Master, however, found “little evidentiary value
as to whether the conversation took place or not,” based on Lt. Grant’s
testimony that he would have transported Krepps regardless of what Paine
told him. The Review Board similarly noted this discrepancy and—with no
analysis—apparently found that the discrepancy supported a Rule 8.1 (a)
violation.
6 The Review Board also noted that during the hearing, Paine testified
that finding the body of one of the murder victims was not important to the
prosecution, and that this testimony contradicted her acknowledgement before
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5. Count IV
Count IV alleged that Paine violated Rule 8.4 (a) (1), which
says that an attorney may not “violate or knowingly attempt to
violate the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, knowingly assist
or induce another to do so, or do so through the acts of another.” The
Bar alleged that Paine “attempted to violate” Rules 3.4 (g) and 4.2,
violated those rules through the acts of Lt. Grant, and “knowingly
assisted” or “induce[d]” Lt. Grant to violate those rules.
The Special Master found that Paine did not violate Rule 3.4
(g) or Rule 4.2; that she did not attempt to violate those rules; and
that she did not assist Lt. Grant in recording attorney-client
conversations. The Special Master also stated that he “found no
evidence that Lt. Grant, or anyone else at the Richmond County
Sheriff’s Office was directed, encouraged, induced or asked by
[Paine] to perform any task on her behalf, including, but not limited
to the recording of any attorney conversation with their client.” The
the criminal trial court that finding the body was important. However, neither
of the statements alleged by the Bar to be violations of Rule 8.1 (a) related to
the importance of finding the victim’s body.
15
Special Master further stated that “[t]here was no evidence that
[Paine] gave any direction to anyone at the Sheriff’s Office, including
Lt. Grant, to transport defendants to CID or to interview or attempt
to interview any of the defendants.”
The Review Board agreed with the Special Master that the Bar
did not prove this count.7
6. Paine’s Exceptions to Counts I and III
Paine contends that the Review Board erred in rejecting as
clearly erroneous the Special Master’s findings that the Bar did not
meet its burden to prove that Paine violated Rules 3.4 (g) and 8.1 as
alleged in Counts I and III. Paine argues that the Review Board
“misquotes and contorts the credibility findings made by the Special
Master by truncating the complete finding.”
7. The Bar’s Response to Paine’s Exceptions
The Bar maintains that Paine violated Rules 3.4 (g) and 8.1 as
7 Because the Special Master concluded there was no evidence to support
the alleged violations set forth in Counts II and IV, the Review Board agreed
with the Special Master’s conclusions, and the Bar took no exception to the
Review Board’s conclusions, we do not address these counts further.
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alleged in Counts I and III, and recommends that Paine receive a
minimum sanction of a public reprimand.
As to Count I, the Bar argues that because Paine knew that
conversations in the CID rooms were recorded in their entirety and
that she knew that the defendants in this case were transported to
the CID to give statements, she must have known that the attorney-
client meetings at issue in this particular case were recorded. The
Bar further argues that Paine “caused” the attorneys to meet with
the defendants in the CID rooms because she told the attorneys
about the transportation of the defendants to the CID. It further
contends that she obtained the CDs with the meeting recordings and
made copies of them.
As to Count III, the Bar argues that although Paine stated in
her grievance response that she had no knowledge of the recordings
of the privileged conversations in this case, Paine admitted that she
knew that all conversations in CID interrogation rooms were
recorded in their entirety. And although Paine stated, through
counsel, that she was not involved in the transport of the defendants
17
from the jail to the sheriff’s office in any manner, she admitted that
she told the attorneys that the defendants were being transported
to the CID.
8. Analysis and Conclusion
As an initial matter, we set out the proper standard of review
for our review of a Special Master’s fact-findings and credibility
determinations. “[B]ecause this Court recognizes that the special
master is in the best position to determine the witnesses’ credibility,
it generally defers to the factual findings and credibility
determinations made by the special master unless those findings or
determinations are clearly erroneous.” In the Matter of Eddings, 314
Ga. 409, 416 (877 SE2d 248) (2022). See also In the Matter of
Braziel, 306 Ga. 385, 387 (830 SE2d 730) (2019) (deferring to the
Special Master’s factual findings because they were “supported by
the record, and we are not in a position to second-guess his
credibility determinations”).
Bar Rule 4-216 (a)—which applies to cases that, like this one,
are initiated after July 1, 2018—provides, in relevant part, that
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“[t]he findings of fact made by a Special Master may be reversed if
the State Disciplinary Review Board finds them to be clearly
erroneous or manifestly in error. Conclusions of law and
determinations of appropriate sanctions shall be reviewed de novo.”
We have recently explained and emphasized that the Review Board
must apply this standard to its review of a Special Master’s fact-
findings and credibility determinations. See In the Matter of Cook,
311 Ga. 206, 215 n.3 (857 SE2d 212) (2021) (explaining that current
Bar Rule 4-216 (a) “specifically limit[s] the Review Board’s ability to
set aside a special master’s factual findings to cases in which the
Review Board finds them to be clearly erroneous or manifestly in
error”).
The application of the clearly erroneous standard is where the
Review Board started making missteps. The Review Board recited
this standard, but then misapplied it by ignoring findings from the
Special Master and by making its own findings inconsistent with the
Special Master’s findings, without explaining why the Special
Master’s findings were clearly erroneous. For example, the Review
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Board appropriately deferred to the Special Master’s finding that
Paine and Krepps’s attorney “were aware that the CID interview
rooms ‘were recorded, both audio and video,’” but then ignored the
very next finding made in the Special Master’s report: that Paine
and the attorney “were also under the mistaken belief that the audio
could be stopped.” Side-stepping this key finding, the Review Board
concluded that Paine had a duty to ensure “that the audio recording
was actually not running at the time the attorney-client
conversation took place.”
Instead of engaging with the relevant factual and credibility
findings the Special Master made after personally hearing and
evaluating the testimony of Paine, Lt. Grant, and Krepps’s attorney,
the Review Board focused on the Special Master’s broad statements
that there “were no facts presented that [Paine] violated Count I”
and that there were “no facts to support” the allegation in Count III.
The Review Board then concluded that these findings were “clearly
erroneous” because “there was evidence upon which findings of fact
could have been drawn to support a violation” in Count I and “there
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are facts contained in the record that support a finding of a violation”
in Count III. In other words, because there was at least some
evidence from which an inference could be drawn that would support
the allegations in Counts I and III that Paine violated Rules 3.4 (g)
and 8.1 (a), the Special Master’s statements that there were “no
facts” to support the violations set forth in Counts I and III were
clearly erroneous and the Special Master’s conclusions must
therefore be discarded.8
We acknowledge that the Special Master may have been overly
broad in stating that there was no evidence to support Counts I and
III, because there was some evidence that could support them,
depending on the inferences and credibility determinations drawn
8
Of course, “some evidence” is not the proper legal standard the Review
Board should have applied. The following point illustrates why the proper
standard matters: even though there was some evidence that could have
supported an inference that Paine knew about the attorney-client recordings
made in this case, the key is that the Special Master did not draw that
inference based on the evidence presented, and instead credited Paine’s
testimony that she did not know that the privileged conversations were
recorded here. To satisfy the proper standard, the Review Board would have
had to explain why the permissible inferences the Special Master drew, and
the credibility determinations the Special Master was authorized to make,
were clearly erroneous. The Review Board did not do so here.
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from that evidence. But the Special Master made the relevant
credibility determinations and rejected the very inferences the
Review Board seems to rely on to make its case, and the Review
Board’s rejection of the Special Master’s overly broad statements in
this regard did not give it license to then ignore the inferences the
Special Master drew and the specific factual findings the Special
Master made.
As relevant to Counts I and III, the Special Master’s specific
findings—which the Review Board did not acknowledge—include
that Paine did not cause the defendants to be transported to CID
and did not invite their attorneys to meet them there; that she did
not participate in any recording of the attorney-client meetings; that
she was under the mistaken belief that the audio recording of the
CID interview rooms could be stopped; and that she was not aware
that any of the CDs contained audio recordings of the attorney-client
conversations when she burned and then distributed them. Given
the testimony and other evidence presented at the hearing, we
cannot say that those findings were clearly erroneous—and the
22
Review Board has offered no basis for concluding that they were. As
such, the Review Board erred by not deferring to them. See Bar Rule
4-216 (a).
Like the Review Board, the Bar appears to ignore some of the
Special Master’s findings in its briefing before this Court.
Specifically, the Bar fails to acknowledge that although the Special
Master found that Paine was “aware that the interview rooms at
CID were recorded, both audio and video,” the Special Master also
found that Paine was “under the mistaken belief that the audio
could be stopped” and credited Paine’s testimony that she did not
know that conversations between attorneys and clients were being
recorded. These findings demonstrate how Paine could know that
the rooms were generally recorded but not know that the privileged
conversations at issue in this case actually were recorded and were
thus copied onto the CDs. And in arguing that Paine caused the
defendants to meet with their attorneys in the CID rooms, the Bar
ignores the Special Master’s finding that Paine had no involvement
in—or influence over—the decision to transport the defendants from
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the jail to the CID and did not invite defense counsel to meet with
their clients in a CID interview room.
Viewed properly, these findings made by the Special Master
are consistent and support his conclusions that Paine did not “use
methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal rights of the
opposing party or counsel” in violation of Rule 3.4 (g) and that she
did not violate Rule 8.1 by stating that “she had no knowledge of the
recordings of privileged conversations until the media started
calling” and by stating that she was not involved in transporting the
defendants to the CID. The Bar’s decision to ignore such findings is
as inexplicable as the Review Board’s decision to replace the Special
Master’s factually supported findings with its own findings.
Affording the proper level of deference to the Special Master’s
factual findings and credibility determinations, see In the Matter of
Eddings, 314 Ga. at 416, we agree with the Special Master that the
Bar did not prove by clear and convincing evidence that Paine
violated Rules 3.4 (g) (Count I) and 8.1 (a) (Count III). We therefore
reject the recommendation of the Review Board that a six-month
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suspension be imposed and the recommendation of the Bar that a
public reprimand be issued. See In the Matter of Lee, 301 Ga. 74,
78-79 (799 SE2d 766) (2017); In the Matter of Cleveland, 285 Ga.
527, 528 (678 SE2d 91) (2009). No discipline is imposed, and this
matter is dismissed.
No discipline imposed and case dismissed. All the Justices
concur.
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