North Carolina Criminal Law

There has been an endless parade of relevant news over the past week or so. First, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in. This New York […]

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In my last post on this topic, I addressed the “new rule” prong of Teague retroactivity analysis as it applies to Melendez-Diaz. I ended that post by noting that another […]

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Jeff Welty blogged here and Jessica Smith published a paper here about the implications of the Supreme Court’s holding in Melendez-Diaz that forensic laboratory reports are testimonial, rendering the affiants […]

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Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. __, 129 S. Ct. 2527 (2009), decided by the United States Supreme Court last month, already has had significant implications for criminal prosecutions in North […]

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I was on vacation last week, and the buzz around Melendez-Diaz — see this prior post for the basics — was partly drowned out by the sound of the waves […]

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In yesterday’s frivolous post, I said that legal news was slow. Not anymore! The United States Supreme Court decided Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts yesterday. It’s a big Confrontation Clause case, and […]

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It seems that video cameras are everywhere, these days: at the bank, at every youth soccer game, in jails and prisons, at Wal-Mart. One often-cited (but apparently questionable) statistic suggests […]

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Editor’s note: A previous post concerning a United States Supreme Court case about post-conviction DNA testing appears here. Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of calls about requests for post-conviction […]

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Suppose that an eyewitness testifies for the state on direct examination that he saw the defendant snatch an old woman’s purse and run off. The defense cross-examines the witness about […]

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Can a lay witness testify that she could tell just by looking at a substance that it was, in fact, a controlled substance? (Let’s assume the witness has extensive dealings […]

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