This post summarizes published criminal and related decisions released by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals during November of 2021. Decisions that may be of interest to state practitioners are summarized monthly. Previous Fourth Circuit summaries are available here.
Case Summaries
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Case Summaries — N.C. Court of Appeals (December 7, 2021)
This post summarizes published criminal and juvenile delinquency decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on December 7, 2021. These summaries will be added to the School’s Criminal Case Compendium.
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Case Summaries – N.C. Court of Appeals (November 16, 2021)
This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on November 16, 2021. These summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present.
Case Summaries: N.C. Court of Appeals (Nov. 2, 2021)
This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals published on November 2, 2021. As always, these summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present.
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Court of Appeals Rules on Pretrial Self-Defense Immunity Hearings
Last month, the Court of Appeals decided State v. Austin, ___ N.C. App. ___, 2021-NCCOA-494 (Sept. 21, 2021), and a summary of the opinion is available here. Austin addressed several noteworthy self-defense issues, including the sufficiency of the state’s evidence to rebut the presumption of reasonable fear under the “castle doctrine” statutes added in 2011 and whether the trial court’s jury instructions on that issue were proper.
But first, the court had to decide whether the statutory language conferring “immunity from liability” meant that the defendant was entitled to have this issue resolved by the judge at a pretrial hearing. That’s a question I’ve been asked fairly often over the past few years, and my sense is that prior to Austin there were divergent practices on this point around the state.
This post takes a closer look at that portion of the court’s opinion, and explores what we now know and what we still don’t.
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Case Summaries: N.C. Court of Appeals (Oct. 5, 2021)
This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on October 5, 2021. As always, these summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present.
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Case Summaries — N.C. Supreme Court (September 24, 2021)
This post summarizes criminal decisions released by the Supreme Court of North Carolina on Friday, September 24, 2021.
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Case Summaries – N.C. Court of Appeals (September 7, 2021)
This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on September 7, 2021. These summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present.