A UNC School of Government Blog
Editor’s note: Jessie has prepared a series of posts about the law of relevancy. They’ll run as an intermittent series over the next several weeks. In this and upcoming posts, I will explore several relevancy issues that arise with some frequency. Perhaps the most litigated relevancy issue in North Carolina criminal cases is the admissibility … Read more
A civil case decided by the court of appeals last week, Blackwell v. Hatley, addresses when a witness may testify as to his or her opinion of how fast a vehicle was traveling. In Blackwell, the court held that an accident report prepared by a town police officer estimating the defendant’s speed at the time … Read more
The court of appeals just decided State v. Hernandez, which raises an important and recurrent hearsay issue. Briefly, the facts of Hernandez are as follows: the defendant traveled with his girlfriend, the victim, to her mother’s home. The defendant exhibited jealous behavior towards his girlfriend. His girlfriend told her mother that the defendant was “wanted … Read more
Update: On February 16, the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued an opinion in State v. Davis, in which law enforcement officers were allowed to offer lay testimony without objection that the substance the defendant sold them was crack cocaine. In a footnote, the Davis panel stated that Llamas-Hernandez did not overrule Freeman as to … Read more
On June 25, 2009, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, holding that forensic laboratory reports are testimonial and thus subject to the new Crawford Confrontation Clause rule. The case, which was decided by a 5-to-4 vote, was a blow to prosecutors, who were hoping that the Court would limit … Read more
Regular readers know that I have a particular interest in the intersection of new technologies and criminal law. But I am not the only person at the School of Government interested in this topic. My colleague Cheryl Howell recently taught a session on electronic evidence — essentially, how the rules of evidence apply to things … Read more
In Melendez-Diaz v. Massachussetts, the United States Supreme Court held that forensic laboratory reports—such as those identifying a substance as a controlled substance—are testimonial and subject to the new Crawford Confrontation Clause rule. For more detail on that decision, you can review a paper posted here. Under the Crawford rule, testimonial statements by declarants who … Read more
Among the most recent batch of opinions issued by the Court of Appeals was State v. Tellez, in which the court upheld the defendant’s conviction of two counts of second-degree murder and one count of felonious hit and run arising from a fatal car crash. Here are the facts: Defendant went to a party in … Read more
In previous posts [editor’s note: her prior posts are here and here] I have written about the developing North Carolina law on the use of substitute analysts after Melendez-Diaz. In writing about State v. Locklear and State v. Galindo, both of which rejected substitute analyst testimony, I noted a common feature of those cases that … Read more
On October 20, 2009, the North Carolina Court of Appeals decided State v. Galindo, holding that a Crawford violation occurred when the State’s expert gave an opinion, in a drug trafficking case, as to the weight of the cocaine at issue, based “solely” on a laboratory report by a non-testifying analyst. To put the decision … Read more