A UNC School of Government Blog
Shea Denning The United States Supreme Court decided Missouri v McNeely yesterday, holding that in impaired driving investigations, the natural dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in every case sufficient to justify conducting a blood test without a warrant. The high court thus resolved the split among state courts regarding whether its … Read more
Suppose a police officer patrolling a city street lawfully pulls over a car with out-of-state tags. When the officer asks the driver for his driver’s license, the driver tells the officer: I had a Maryland driver’s license, but it was revoked. May the law enforcement officer properly charge the defendant with driving while license revoked … Read more
Vehicle crashes are an obvious risk of impaired driving. Thus, it is not unusual for impaired driving prosecutions to follow post-crash investigations, which typically include questioning of the suspected driver. When the State prosecutes impaired driving cases that follow certain types of crashes—namely single car crashes to which there are no witnesses other than the … Read more
The state crime lab and other local laboratories perform nearly 10,000 blood toxicology analyses annually, the vast majority of them in impaired driving cases. Unlike breath analysis results, which the State has in hand before a person’s initial appearance in an impaired driving case, several months may elapse after a person’s arrest for impaired driving … Read more
Drunk driving has long been a phrase in the national lexicon of terms related driving and public safety. Over the past decade, a companion term—drugged driving—has entered into common usage as policy makers have focused their attention on reducing the incidence of driving while impaired by substances other than alcohol. The problem, of course, is … Read more
Trial courts may ultimately control their calendars, but there certainly is some power-sharing along the way. The constraints on a trial district court’s authority to manage the flow of litigation are particularly significant in impaired driving cases. Indeed, G.S. 20-139.1(e2) requires that implied consent cases in district court be continued until the chemical analyst who analyzed … Read more
The State’s failure to accord a defendant his or her statutory implied consent rights as set forth in G.S. 20-16.2 may render the results of any ensuing breath test inadmissible. When a defendant moves to suppress breath test results based on such a violation, questions frequently arise regarding whether the State bears the burden of demonstrating compliance … Read more
Magistrates walk a tight rope of sorts in setting conditions of pretrial release for defendants charged with impaired driving offenses. In addition to taking into account all of the factors they must consider when setting conditions of pretrial release in any criminal case and setting conditions accordingly, see G.S. 15A-534, magistrates who set conditions of … Read more
A six-year battle in Minnesota regarding the reliability of breath test results in impaired driving cases in light of alleged defects in the testing instrument’s source code ended last summer. The State mostly won, though the Minnesota Supreme Court determined that machine-generated reports of a deficient breath sample were unreliable absent corroborating evidence. The case … Read more
The North Carolina Supreme Court granted Wednesday the state’s petition for a writ of supersedeas to stay enforcement of the court of appeals’ judgment in State v. McKenzie, ___ N.C. App. ___ (January 15, 2012). McKenzie held, over a dissent, that the one-year disqualification of a defendant’s commercial driver’s license (CDL) based on the issuance … Read more