A UNC School of Government Blog
Shea Denning Author’s Note: The opinion discussed below was withdrawn on February 4, 2014 and replaced by an opinion discussed here. How can a sentencing factor found by a judge that doubles a defendant’s maximum sentence not implicate Blakely? I pondered this question a few years ago after the court of appeals in State v. Green, … Read more
Local law enforcement officers have a little bit of extra territorial jurisdiction when it comes to investigating impaired driving. That grant of extra territorial jurisdiction (as opposed to extraterritorial jurisdiction, which city officers already had) was created by the Motor Vehicle Driver Protection Act of 2006 and codified in G.S. 20-38.2. General Rules. G.S. 15A-402 … Read more
A DWI conviction will cost you. Let’s take the case of a typical defendant who has never before been charged with or convicted of DWI. I’ll call him Forrest Firsttimer. Forrest is arrested at a DWI checkpoint. He submits to a breath test, which reports an alcohol concentration of 0.08. Forrest is taken before a … Read more
Deep in the statutory woods of the law allowing the seizure of motor vehicles driven by certain impaired drivers is a provision setting trial priority for the underlying criminal charges. G.S. 20-28.3(m) requires that district court trials of impaired driving offenses involving forfeiture of motor vehicles be scheduled on the arresting officer’s next court date … Read more
When a defendant move to dismiss DWI charges based on a violation of his pre-trial release rights, the State’s first response is predictable: Subpoena the magistrate who presided over the defendant’s initial appearance. And in case after case, our appellate courts have considered testimony from magistrates in determining whether a defendant’s rights to pretrial release … Read more
Yesterday a jury in Wake County convicted Markeith Council, a former detention officer at the Wake County jail, of involuntary manslaughter for killing inmate Shon McClain, who was jailed on misdemeanor charges, after McClain fought the guard. A video shown at the trial shows the much larger Council slamming McClain twice on the concrete floor. … Read more
As of December 1, 2013, there is a new type of driving while license revoked under G.S. Chapter 20. The Old Law. Most violations of G.S. 20-28(a) committed before December 1, 2013 were punishable as Class 1 misdemeanors. Three exceptions applied. The following types of drivers were punished as though they had been convicted of … Read more
The court of appeals decided its first post-Missouri v. McNeely alcohol exigency case yesterday. The court in State v. Dahlquist determined that the four to five hours that the arresting officer estimated would have elapsed had he first traveled to the intake center at the jail to obtain a search warrant and then taken the … Read more
The News and Observer reported Sunday on the Hamlet Police Department’s seizure of vehicles from drivers charged with low-level traffic offenses and the subsequent selling of those vehicles as scrap in what the reporter characterized as a “series of questionable and off-the-books transactions handled by the police.” A story in today’s paper states that the … Read more
The first two posts in this series (here and here) discussed opinions from state supreme courts in Arizona and Minnesota considering, post-McNeely v. Missouri, 133 S.Ct. 1552 (2013), whether a suspect’s submission to implied consent testing was voluntary consent within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. This post discusses why that sort of analysis is … Read more