North Carolina Criminal Law

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 […]

Read post

Forget all your legal training. Pretend you are a juror in a DWI case. Facts. The following facts were established at trial: The defendant was stopped at a checkpoint. The […]

Read post

When a defendant pleads guilty, the judge is required to “inform[] him of the maximum possible sentence” associated with his offense. G.S. 15A-1022(a)(6). When a defendant pleads guilty to being […]

Read post

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 […]

Read post

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided a case that one Justice called “perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this Court has heard in decades.” A bare majority of the […]

Read post

As state crime lab backlogs increase, it takes longer and longer for blood drawn in connection with impaired driving cases to be tested. In some of these cases, the State […]

Read post

Two cases this month from the Court of Appeals, one published and one not, offer different perspectives on the meaning of an appeal for a “trial de novo” in superior […]

Read post

There’s been quite a buzz lately about Google Glass, a “wearable computer” that looks like a pair of eyeglasses but that uses the lenses as transparent screens to display information […]

Read post

A couple of this blog’s recent Friday News Roundups have linked offbeat stories about contempt and cellphones. In the first a Michigan judge held himself in contempt and ordered a […]

Read post

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been arrested in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings. CNN reports that he “lies in a hospital with a gunshot wound to the side of his neck, […]

Read post