A UNC School of Government Blog
Jeff Welty 
It’s the first Monday in October, which means that the Supreme Court gets back to business after its summer recess. Among the criminal cases the Court will consider this Term are the following: Missouri v. McNeely. As noted in Friday’s News Roundup, this case asks “[w]hether a law enforcement officer may obtain a nonconsensual and … Read more
I wrote earlier this week about James Ladd, the murderer who recently escaped from a North Carolina prison. Well, he’s been caught, apparently without much fuss: a motorist saw a man running from some woods towards a house and called the authorities, who went to the house and found Ladd crouched in the garage. In … Read more
An Egyptian-American activist/columnist/media personality named Mona Eltahawy was recently arrested in New York while defacing a pro-Israel subway advertisement. The entire incident was captured on video and can be seen here. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Orin Kerr focuses on Ms. Eltahawy’s demand that the arresting officer tell her what she was being arrested … Read more
A murderer recently escaped from a North Carolina prison. According to this News and Observer story, the escapee is James Ladd, who was convicted in 1981 of two counts of murder and one count of armed robbery. Mr. Ladd escaped from the minimum-security Tillery Correctional Center in Halifax County on Sunday. He was serving three … Read more
The story generating the most interest this week is, in the words of the News and Observer, that “[a] two-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice has found that [Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson] and his deputies routinely discriminated against Latinos by making unwarranted arrests with the intent of maximizing deportations.” Among other conclusions, … Read more
Rule 403 provides that “[a]lthough relevant, evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice . . . needless presentation of cumulative evidence,” or other factors. There’s considerable case law about the application of Rule 403 to photographs of homicide victims. A recent case from the Third … Read more
There have been several sad and frightening stories in the news recently, from the apparent murder of UNC undergraduate Faith Hedgepeth, to the ice cream truck operator charged with being a sexual predator, but the one that may have struck the deepest nerve is the fatal shooting of Kathy Bertrand by her ex-husband in Raleigh. … Read more
A couple of recent news stories led me to think about the possibility of a particular type of class disparity in the criminal justice system. Here are the two stories: Two big-time UNC fundraisers have resigned. The two were dating. They went on several trips together, at university expense, to locations where one of the … Read more
It was a short week, but not a slow week. Here in North Carolina, the News and Observer has this story describing the increase in post-release supervision resulting from the Justice Reinvestment Act, and noting the lack of any additional supervising officers to handle the influx. Officers’ caseloads are way up, and the Division of … Read more