A UNC School of Government Blog
Several earlier posts (here, here, here and here) and this article discuss the North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling in State v. Ward, 364 N.C. 133 (2010), that the identification of a controlled substance based upon mere visual inspection is insufficiently reliable to serve as the basis for an expert’s opinion pursuant to Rule 702 of … Read more
A couple of months ago, the court of appeals decided State v. McDowell, __ N.C. App. __, 715 S.E.2d 602 (2011). The defendant was convicted of first-degree murder notwithstanding his claim of self-defense. A passage from the court’s opinion caught my eye: Dave Cloutier, an expert in use-of-force science and self-defense tactics, testified that, given … Read more
Suppose a person who speaks only Spanish is stopped on suspicion of impaired driving by two officers, Officer A and Officer B. Officer A speaks and understands only English. Officer B is fluent in English and Spanish. Officer B asks the defendant if he has been drinking. The defendant states, in Spanish, that he drank … Read more
According to my teenaged kids, “corpus delicti” sounds like something that will get you in trouble if you write about it on a government-sponsored blog. It is, however, an issue that arises in criminal cases. The term “corpus delicti” (sometimes spelled corpus delecti) means the body of the crime. Black’s Law Dictionary 310 (5th ed. … Read more
As blog readers well know, the new Crawford confrontation clause rule provides that absent an exception or a waiver of rights, testimonial hearsay statements of a declarant who does not testify at trial may not be admitted unless the witness is unavailable and there has been a prior opportunity for cross-examination. This is a tough … Read more
G.S. 20-138.1(a)(2) prohibits a person from driving a vehicle upon a highway, street or public vehicular area after having consumed sufficient alcohol that the person has, at any relevant time after the driving, an alcohol concentration of 0.08 or more. S.L. 2006-253 amended this subsection to provide, effective for offenses committed on or after December 1, … Read more
Eating the evidence might yield a stomach ache but it won’t ensure an acquittal. That is the lesson learned from State v. James, a case recently decided by the N.C. Court of Appeals. In James, an officer was patrolling in an unmarked vehicle when the defendant waived her over. As the officer opened her car … Read more
The court of appeals decided State v. Howard earlier this week. The opinion addresses several issues, but I want to focus on what is sometimes called the connected crimes doctrine, which allows the state to introduce evidence of uncharged crimes closely related to a charged offense notwithstanding Rule 404(b)’s limitations on evidence of uncharged bad … Read more
In a post here, I wrote about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 131 S. Ct. 2705 (2011), holding that substitute analyst testimony in an impaired driving case violated Crawford. Bullcoming was no great surprise in light of the Court’s prior decision in Melendez-Diaz. However, less than one week after the … Read more
Sometimes the state wants to introduce evidence that the defendant invoked his right to remain silent or his right to counsel under Miranda. If the prosecution’s purpose is simply to imply the defendant’s guilt, we know that’s improper from Miranda itself: “In accord with our decision today, it is impermissible to penalize an individual for … Read more