A UNC School of Government Blog
Jeff Welty 
Update: I knew it. One reader emailed me to say that our appellate courts have approved truncated jury instructions for at least thirty years, and referred me to State v. Gainey, 355 N.C. 72 (2002), which collects some cases and states that the court “has discouraged needless repetition” during jury instructions. Original Post: One of … Read more
G.S. 90-96 is one of the densest, most used, and most misunderstood statutes on the books. Let’s try to unpack it a little bit. There are two distinct subsections under which cases may fall — subsections (a) and (a1) — and the two subsections are different in scope and in effect. We’ll start with subsection … Read more
One of the services that we offer here at the School of Government is what I like to call the “hotline.” When you have a question about the law, you can call us or email us and we’ll try to answer it. Although different faculty members treat those calls slightly differently, most of us treat … Read more
Can the state compel a suspect to provide access to encrypted files on the suspect’s computer? For example, if the police suspect that I’m running a Ponzi scheme, but I’ve got all my business records encrypted, can the state require me to produce an unencrypted version of the records? It’s an important question because more … Read more
The Court of Appeals released a number of opinions yesterday. Bob Farb will undoubtedly release his inimitable summaries shortly — to sign up to receive the summaries by email, go here — but I wanted to call attention to one case right away, as it should be of interest to officers, prosecutors, and defense lawyers … Read more
The Sixth Circuit, sitting en banc, recently decided a very interesting Miranda case. Garner v. Mitchell, available here, is a capital case. The defendant stole a woman’s purse, took a taxi to her house, robbed it, and set it on fire to conceal his fingerprints, killing five of the six children who were sleeping in … Read more
There’s lots of news these days about the Bernie Madoff case. Apparently, he’s going to plead guilty today, without a plea agreement, exposing himself to a virtually certain life sentence. I wonder why he’s doing that. An interesting article, available here, tries to figure out the angle, but comes up empty. Could he have suddenly … Read more
According to a News and Observer story available here, MySpace has provided the Attorney General’s office with a list of 2,116 registered North Carolina sex offenders who were on MySpace. (You can read more about this in the AG’s press release, here.) The SBI has shared the list with all 100 sheriffs, and the SBI’s … Read more
The News and Observer ran a story recently — available here — about the length of time it takes to resolve murder cases in North Carolina. The average time to disposition was 528 days last year. That figure includes cases resolved by plea or dismissal, suggesting that the average time to trial is probably longer. … Read more
I’m more interested than the average person in the intersection between criminal law and emerging technologies. Several blog-worthy stories in that area have developed over the last few days. First, it looks like more states are considering legislation to keep sex offenders off social networking sites. I wrote about North Carolina’s law here, and you … Read more