Search : unpublished opinions

As far as I know, July 21, 2015, was a pretty normal day at the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The court published around a dozen opinions. Most of them dealt with issues like worker’s compensation and equitable distribution, but there were a few criminal cases. One of them was State v. Saldierna, a juvenile interrogation case, which was later reversed. Bob Farb blogged about that here.

In other words, just another day at the office.

The court also released more than 30 additional opinions on the same day, on the same website, written by the same judges, and many of them addressed hot-button criminal topics like lay witness identification of drugs, custodial interrogations of juveniles, sufficiency of a drug indictment, and improper closing arguments.

But those cases were marked as “unpublished,” so we all pretty much just ignored them and pretended they didn’t happen.

Wait… what? What are unpublished cases? We’re told that citing to them is “disfavored,” so are they good law or not? Who decides which cases make the cut for publication? And more importantly — why? In a digital world where cases are available online, what does “unpublished” really mean? And why are we talking about July 21, 2015?

So many questions. I have one or two answers.

Along with the published cases released by the N.C. Court of Appeals on August 3, 2010, was an unpublished case of note. In State v. Davis, __ N.C. App. __ […]

I have written before about the cache associated with a handful of unpublished opinions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Sure, they aren’t binding, but they can be persuasive. My guess is that the Court’s December 2023 opinion in State v. C.K.D.. No. COA23-204, 2023 WL 8748032, ___ N.C. App. ___, 895 S.E.2d 923 (2023) (unpublished), has been used as a persuasive tool in more than a few impaired driving cases since it was decided.

The C.K.D. Court upheld the dismissal of impaired driving charges based on the detention of the defendant for 11 hours following his initial appearance pursuant to an impaired driving hold. The Court determined that (1) there was no clear and convincing evidence that the defendant who had registered a 0.17 alcohol concentration posed a danger, and (2) holding the defendant for 11 hours irreparably prejudiced the defendant’s case by depriving him of the opportunity to have others observe his condition, even though the defendant indicated he did not wish to call anyone to witness his condition in the jail or to assume responsibility for him as a sober, responsible adult. I was a bit surprised by the outcome. I would have thought that the alcohol concentration standing alone would have been sufficient to support the hold. I also would have thought that the defendant’s failure to attempt to contact anyone from jail would have defeated his claim of irreparable prejudice. As noted, I would have been wrong on both counts.

This post will discuss C.K.D., explore how it differs from other court of appeals decisions following Knoll, and consider what the takeaways may be for magistrates imposing such holds.

The court of appeals issued opinions today. I haven’t looked at all of them, but State v. Best jumped out at me because it provides an authoritative answer to a […]

More than a decade ago, the General Assembly enacted G.S. 20-141.5, making it a Class 1 misdemeanor to operate a motor vehicle on street, highway, or public vehicular area while […]

In an earlier post, I discussed one category of unprotected speech that may be criminally punished consistent with the First Amendment, speech integral to criminal conduct. My former colleague Jonathan […]

I recently participated in a WFAE radio show about law enforcement use of drones, along with a captain from the Winston-Salem Police Department and an advocate from the ACLU. I thought the discussion was excellent, with a nice balance of perspectives. In the course of preparing for the program, I did an environmental scan about how law enforcement officers are currently using drones, and looked for court opinions about some of the legal questions presented by drone use. This post summarizes what I learned before and during the show.

This post summarizes published criminal law and related cases released by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals during August 2025. Cases of potential interest to state practitioners are summarized monthly. Previous summaries of Fourth Circuit cases are available here.

Special thanks to Sloan Godbey, Summer Law Fellow at UNC SOG, for their significant contributions to this post.

In March of last year, I did a thorough review of North Carolina cases addressing the authentication of surveillance video. I created a chart to understand what ingredients are adequate (and inadequate) to lay a foundation. That chart can be found here, and the related blog here.

However, a case came down in March of this year that raises significant questions about how video is authenticated, or at least introduces a new potential avenue for authenticating video. I’m afraid my cherished chart may soon be of limited utility. But such is the way the law develops!

This post summarizes the published criminal opinions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on July 16, 2025.