The North Carolina Supreme Court held in State v. Julius, 385 N.C. 331 (2023) (Julius I), that an officer’s warrantless search of a vehicle trapped in a ditch and partially submerged by water was not authorized by the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment. The state supreme court remanded the case to the trial court to determine whether exclusion of the evidence discovered as a result of that search was appropriate and whether any exceptions to the exclusionary rule applied. In his partial dissent in Julius I, the Chief Justice stated that were he to find a constitutional violation, he would agree with the majority’s decision to remand the case to the trial court to determine whether exclusion was appropriate. The Chief Justice concluded by stating: “Notably, since 1986, we have recognized the good faith exception is applicable to violations of the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 350 (Newby, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). When I wrote about the opinion shortly after it was decided, I said it was “an unlikely vehicle for teeing up reconsideration of the good faith exception – at least in its currently recognized form.”
As it turns out, the trial court on remand did rely upon the good faith exception in determining that the evidence discovered during the search was not subject to the exclusionary rule. And before the appeal from that order was calendared for consideration by a three-judge panel of the court of appeals, another case, State v. Rogers, 388 N.C. 453 (2025) (discussed here), teed up the appellate courts’ reconsideration of the good faith exception. The North Carolina Supreme Court in Rogers held that, assuming there is an exclusionary rule arising from the North Carolina Constitution, that rule contains a good faith exception equivalent to the federal good faith exception. And in round two of State v. Julius, No. COA25-277, ___ N.C. App. ___ (2026) (Julius II), the court of appeals affirmed the trial court’s ruling that the good faith exception applied, though the two judges who agreed about the result disagreed about the reasoning and a third judge dissented. This post will examine the fractured opinion in Julius II.
First, the facts. Joanna Julius was riding as a passenger in her parents’ car in McDowell County when the person driving the car crashed it into a ditch filled with water. The driver fled the scene. Law enforcement officers responded and searched the car for evidence of the driver’s identity. When they found drugs inside the vehicle, they arrested Julius and searched her backpack. There, they found more drugs, a pistol, and cash.
Julius was indicted for drug trafficking and related offenses. She moved to suppress the evidence gathered at the scene on the basis that the car was unlawfully searched. The trial court disagreed, and Julius was convicted. As previously noted, Julius appealed. On remand, the trial court determined that the search of the vehicle was supported by probable cause and the good faith exception to the warrant requirement applied such that the evidence discovered during the search was not subject to the exclusionary rule. Julius appealed from that ruling.
Chief Judge Dillon wrote the lead opinion. Chief Judge Dillon agreed with the trial court that the vehicle search was supported by probable cause. He further reasoned that the good faith exception recognized in Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011) (discussed here), for an officer’s objectively reasonable reliance on binding precedent applied to the case at hand. Chief Judge Dillon opined that the officer who carried out the search “objectively acted in good faith” given prior opinions from the state supreme court, the Supreme Court of the United States, and federal courts of appeal holding that a vehicle’s temporary immobility is not fatal to the application of the automobile exception. Slip op. at 10.
Judge Stroud concurred in the result only. Judge Stroud agreed that the trial court rightly denied the defendant’s motion to suppress because the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule applied, but she disagreed with the lead opinion’s reasoning. She faulted the lead opinion for considering probable cause, which she said both ignored the remand instructions from the state supreme court and was irrelevant to the good-faith exception. Judge Stroud also charged the lead opinion with “badly misread[ing] Davis,” which she wrote “applies when ‘binding appellate precedent specifically authorizes a particular police practice.’” Slip op. at 9 (Stroud, J. concurring in result). That test was not met here, Judge Stroud contended, because the officer’s conduct was not justified by clear, binding precedent that later changed. Indeed Judge Stroud opined that the law at issue had not changed as the “automobile exception has always required exigency—usually mobility—to justify bypassing the warrant requirement.” Slip op. at 11 (Stroud, J. concurring in result).
Judge Stroud returned to the purposes of the exclusionary rule, noting that it is a judicially created rule to be applied when it results in appreciable deterrence and the benefits of deterrence outweigh the costs. Slip op. at 3 (Stroud, J. concurring in result) (citing Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009)). Judge Stroud cited Davis, 564 U.S. at 238, for the proposition that in deciding whether to apply the exclusionary rule, the focus is on the flagrancy (or in other words, the culpability) of the law enforcement misconduct at issue. She wrote that when officers “‘act with an objectively reasonable good-faith belief that their conduct is lawful,’ or their ‘conduct involves only simple, isolated negligence,’ the ‘deterrence rationale loses much of its force, and exclusion cannot pay its way.’” Slip op. at 4 (Stroud, J. concurring in result) (quoting Davis, 564 U.S. at 238).
Judge Stroud characterized the unconstitutional search as resulting from the officer’s erroneous judgment call about whether the fleeing driver created an exigency sufficient to excuse the warrant requirement for a search of an immobile vehicle. The officer’s belief that there was such an exigency was not, in Judge Stroud’s view, culpable. Instead it was the type of “‘objectively reasonable good-faith belief’ that doesn’t warrant exclusion.” Slip op. at 5 (Stroud, J. concurring in result) (quoting Davis, 564 U.S. at 238).
Judge Tyson’s dissent. Judge Tyson would have held that the State failed to prove the good faith exception applied and thus would have vacated the trial court’s order and remanded the case for dismissal of the charges.
Judge Tyson explained that the good faith exception has barred the application of the exclusionary rule in four circumstances: when officers have objectively and reasonably relied in good faith upon (1) a warrant later determined to be deficient (United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984)); (2) subsequently invalidated statutes (Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340 (1987)); (3) erroneous arrest warrant information (Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009); Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1 (1995)); and (4) binding appellate precedent (Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011)). He concluded that none of those established good faith exceptions applied to the case at hand. He charged the lead opinion and concurrence with expanding the good faith exception in a manner that swallows the exclusionary rule.
Takeaways. It is hard to know what to take away from Julius II. As the lead opinion notes, its binding effect does not extend beyond its holding and any part of the concurring opinion that agrees with the lead opinion. One notable aspect of both the lead and concurring opinions is their expansive view of the good faith exception. Jeff Welty foreshadowed that possibility more than a decade ago, questioning whether the “the reasoning of Davis [might] extend to at least some cases not governed by binding precedent.”
North Carolina’s appellate courts are not alone in wrestling with Davis’s reach. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals recently issued a divided opinion in State v. Wells, 341 A.3d 1096 (D.C. Cir. 2025), in which the court declined to extend the good faith exception to evidence obtained through GPS monitoring of the defendant while he was on supervised release. That monitoring, while unconstitutional, had been imposed pursuant to agency policy. Wells summarized United States Supreme Court precedent as applying the good faith exception in only two scenarios: “(1) where law enforcement was itself blameless by virtue of its reasonable reliance on a third party who could not be expected to feel the deterrent effects of suppression, as in Leon, Krull, Evans, and [Davis]” or (2) “when any law enforcement culpability was otherwise detached from the resulting constitutional violation because it was attenuated … as in Herring.” Id. at 1105. The court rejected the notion that the good faith exception applies when officers could have reasonably believed their conduct was lawful. While it acknowledged that language in Herring and Davis could be read “to portend such a cataclysmic shift in the law,” the court stated that the federal courts of appeals “are in accord that the more sweeping reading of Herring and [Davis], applying the good faith exception to constitutional violations that were fairly debatable, cannot be the law.” Id. at 1114-15 (internal quotations omitted).
The dissenting judge in Wells interpreted Supreme Court precedent differently, quoting the same passage from Davis as Judge Stroud’s concurrence and explaining that “the Supreme Court has made clear that a police officer . . . acts blamelessly, for purpose of the exclusionary rule, whenever the officer (or agency) conducts a search in the objectively reasonable belief that the search was lawful.’” Id. at 1124 (McLeese, J., dissenting). See also United States v. Katzin, 769 F.3d 163 (3d Cir. 2014) (en banc) (holding that suppression of evidence obtained from the unconstitutional surveillance of a vehicle through a GPS device affixed to the vehicle by government agents without a warrant was not appropriate; reasoning that the agents acted upon an “objectively reasonable good faith belief in the legality of their conduct,” given the “panoply of authority” that appeared to authorize their conduct).
We will have to stay tuned to see whether the defendant seeks review by the North Carolina Supreme Court and whether any such petition is granted.
