North Carolina Criminal Law

I’ve updated my paper on traffic stops, which a fair number of people have said they found useful. It covers reasonable suspicion, the scope of a stop, termination of a […]

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Y’all may be tired of reading about sentencing in impaired driving cases, particularly if you’ve read this entire bulletin.  But I’m hoping the reader-market will bear a few more sentencing-related […]

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Jeff wrote earlier this week about the court of appeals’ opinion in State v. Osterhoudt (August 21, 2012).  Jeff’s post dealt with the court’s substantive analysis of whether the police […]

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A good rule of thumb is that most interesting impaired driving appeals come from Pitt County. Whether that is related to ECU’s ranking as a top five “party school,” I […]

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I’ve heard folks say that there is criminal law . . . and then there is impaired driving law.  What I think they mean is that while impaired driving is, […]

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Can an officer’s visual estimate of a vehicle’s speed, uncorroborated by radar, pacing, or other techniques, support a speeding stop? The Fourth Circuit has been whipsawing back and forth on […]

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May an officer prolong a routine traffic stop for four and a half minutes to allow a drug dog to sniff the exterior of the vehicle–even if the officer lacks […]

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Every so often, someone asks whether a person must have a driver’s license to drive a moped on a public street in this state.  The answer is no—provided that the […]

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[Editor’s Note: We are continuing to experience difficulty with our email subscription function. In attempting to remedy the problem, our hard-working technical folks accidentally sent two test email notifications to […]

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Five years ago, the General Assembly authorized judges to require that defendants placed on probation for a Level One or Level Two impaired driving offense abstain from consuming alcohol for […]

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