North Carolina Criminal Law

In State v. Cooper, issued last week, the Court of Appeals reversed the defendant’s conviction for first-degree murder of his wife and ordered a new trial. The case has drawn […]

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Trial lawyers love a good gotcha moment and this method of impeachment–by prior inconsistent statement–presents lots of opportunities for that. Proving that a witness previously made statements inconsistent with his […]

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When may rap lyrics written by a defendant be admitted as evidence of guilt? That question has been in the news quite a bit lately as a result of a […]

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The North Carolina Court of Appeals decided its first breath-testing source code case yesterday.  The court in State v. Marino affirmed the trial court’s determination that the defendant had no […]

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If you’re on my listserv, you know that the NC Supreme Court recently issued several confrontation clause decisions, all dealing with substitute analysts (if you’re not on my listserv, you […]

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Nearly two thousand defendants were charged last year with aiding and abetting driving while impaired in violation of G.S. 20-138.1. A defendant aids and abets impaired driving when he knowingly […]

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Rule 45. This rule surprised me. Before I learned about it, I assumed that when a party sought to introduce hospital medical records at trial, a records custodian appeared in […]

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My recent paper (here) on the use of remote testimony in criminal cases involving forensic analysts was written in part because of the flood of interest in legislative solutions to […]

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As I noted in my last post on Rule 404(b) evidence, even when the evidence is relevant to an issue other than propensity or disposition, admissibility is “constrained by the […]

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Suppose that a murder defendant goes by the street name “Hit Man.” The prosecution wants the investigating officer to testify that she received a tip that “Hit Man” committed the […]

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