In Monday’s post, Jeff mentioned the expanded authority for license plate readers included in the state budget. News stories this week exemplify arguments on both sides of the issue of expanded use of cameras and other law enforcement technologies. WRAL reported that a Wake County woman was arrested in Charlotte and charged with abduction of children after Flock cameras were used to identify her vehicle. The Vance County Sheriff’s Office worked with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to track her—demonstrating what is often cited as one of the most valuable uses of the tech: helping to locate missing children.
On the other hand, those concerned about privacy safeguards and potential misuse of surveillance data may be troubled by a different story out of Charlotte. According to this report from the Charlotte Observer, a CMPD officer has been charged with illegally accessing government computers, allegedly as part of an effort to retrieve license plate data on behalf of a drug dealer.
CNN has a story about concerned citizens taking matters into their own hands, “mobbing” cameras, blocking them with cardboard, or forcibly disabling them. Some describe the activists as vigilantes, others call them vandals. The story notes that Flock has 120,000 automated license plate readers (ALPR) and “pan, tilt, and zoom” (PTZ) cameras deployed nationally.
On a related technology front, Ohio recently enacted a law, House Bill 251, requiring police to obtain a warrant to use a drone in certain situations where a warrant would be required for an in-person search, such as actually flying a drone into a home. The law expressly allows a drone to be used without a search warrant in various situations, including when they “operate in navigable airspace, in a physically nonintrusive manner, in order to observe what is otherwise visible to the naked eye”—begging a few of the questions Jeff noted in his 2019 post on warrantless use of drones.
In other news, Bryan Kohberger, the man convicted of killing four students at the University of Idaho in 2022, has filed a petition to withdraw his guilty pleas in the case. Potentially facing the death penalty, Kohberger pled guilty to four counts of first-degree murder, for which he received four consecutive sentences of life without parole. Now, in an interview and correspondence with the New York Times, Kohberger is proclaiming his “actual innocence,” and seeking to withdraw a plea he says was based on “false promises and blatant disinformation” from his appointed lawyers. In North Carolina, the bar for withdrawing a plea after sentencing is a high one, as Jessie Smith discussed in this blog post from 2015.
As Jacqui Greene discussed back in April in this post, IDS has a relatively new process for the appointment and payment of counsel for cases in which a juvenile between the ages of 13 and 17 is charged with first-degree murder (or an undesignated degree of murder). The Office of the Juvenile Defender has prepared a chart summarizing that process, including the counties covered under the program and the relevant points of contact.
Finally, the Sentencing Matters Substack posted an interview with economist Jennifer Doleac about her recent book, The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice. A full review of the book by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and sentencing expert Jonathan Wroblewski is available here. Wide-ranging topics include a project looking at the effects of GLP-1s on substance use disorder and jail time. Dr. Doleac also shared her bottom-line thought that, based on the available evidence, the best way to deter and prevent crime is by increasing the probability of getting caught. I enjoyed reading an economist-eye-view of criminal justice topics, and I thought our readers would too.
Have a great weekend.
