North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Like many lawyers, I served on a law review when I was a law student. It was a good experience: I became intimately familiar with the rules of legal citation, […]

My colleague Michael Crowell recently published a paper on judicial recusal, available here as a free download. It includes a discussion of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Caperton v. […]

Back in July the court of appeals decided State v. Hubbard, a probation revocation case that I mentioned in passing but never really discussed in depth. In Hubbard the defendant’s […]

Further Update: See Shea Denning’s post here about State v. Mumford, in which the court of appeals held that “logically inconsistent and legally contradictory” verdicts cannot stand. It has the […]

Melendez-Diaz v. Massachussetts, as most readers of this blog know, is the United States Supreme Court’s latest pronouncement on the Confrontation Clause. Generally, it holds that forensic laboratory reports — […]

Last week the court of appeals decided State v. Wagoner, its latest case involving satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. Mr. Wagoner, who had previously been convicted of multiple reportable […]

I’m working on revising Arrest Warrant and Indictment Forms, a manual that provides charging language for several hundred common offenses. In the course of working on language for possession of […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’m a little like a broadcaster for a small-market sports team, in that I’m a relentless “homer,” always impressed with the efforts of the School of Government faculty. With that […]