North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Suppose a law enforcement officer enters the front door of your home without a warrant. You are asleep when he enters, but wake up when you hear the door open. You pick a gun up from your nightstand and walk toward the front door. The officer sees you coming toward him with the gun pointed in his direction. Is it reasonable for him to shoot you? Is the entity that employed the officer liable for your injuries?

I discussed the inevitable discovery exception in my last post. This post will discuss the independent source exception, particularly the United States Supreme Court cases of Segura v. United States, 468 U.S. 796 (1984), and Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988), and related North Carolina cases. It should be noted that the independent source exception was initially adopted in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920), and can apply to investigations involving Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendment violations.

Two important exceptions to exclusionary rules under the federal constitution were adopted by the United States Supreme Court within a month of each other in 1984: (1) the inevitable discovery exception in Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984), and (2) the independent source exception in Segura v. United States, 468 U.S. 796 (1984); see also the later case of Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988). These two exceptions continue to be litigated. This post will discuss the inevitable discovery exception, and my next post will discuss the independent source exception.

An officer who stops a motorist for a traffic infraction may run a computer check on the driver’s license and may check for outstanding warrants. The results of these checks may determine how the officer proceeds. For example, if a check reveals that the driver’s license is revoked, the officer may charge the driver with DWLR and may direct the driver that he or she cannot drive the vehicle away from the location of the stop. May an officer also check a motorist’s criminal record? Such historical information is less likely to dictate the officer’s course of action. But knowing whether a motorist has a record of violent crimes may help an officer determine how cautious he or she must be while completing the stop. This post discusses whether an officer may take time to run a motorist’s criminal record, and summarizes two recent cases on point.

This post reviews what is commonly known as “hot pursuit” of a suspect to make an arrest outside an officer’s territorial jurisdiction. Note, however, that the actual term in G.S. 15A-402(d) is the “immediate and continuous flight” by a suspect from an officer’s territory. Also, although the statute is specifically confined to an officer’s arrest authority, court cases include other law enforcement actions such as investigative stops and searches.

In Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), the United States Supreme Court significantly limited the scope of a traffic stop. It is almost exactly two years since the ruling, and appellate court opinions throughout the country are still proliferating. And so have our faculty’s blog posts: Jeff Welty has written relevant posts here, here, here, here, and here, Alyson Grine here and here, Shea Denning here, Phil Dixon here, and my posts are here, here, and here. This post summarizes Rodriguez and three North Carolina Court of Appeals rulings that are currently before the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Jeff Welty wrote a post in 2010 on when a seizure occurs after an officer operates emergency lights to order a driver to stop his or her vehicle. This post updates his post by summarizing the relatively recent North Carolina Court of Appeals case of State v. Mangum, ___ N.C. App. ___, 795 S.E.2d 106 (Dec. 6, 2016), review denied, ___ N.C. ___, 2017 WL 1086917 (March 16, 2017), which ruled on this issue and provides a useful summary of the case law in North Carolina and other jurisdictions.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled (2-1) in Smith v. Munday, 848 F.3d 248 (4th Cir. Feb. 3, 2017), that a North Carolina officer was not entitled to summary judgment in a civil lawsuit for arresting the plaintiff allegedly without probable cause. This case is the subject of this post.

In Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that an officer may “search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant's arrest only when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment” or it is “reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.” Gant involved an arrest for driving with a suspended license, and the Court concluded that was “an offense for which police could not expect to find evidence in the passenger compartment” of the arrestee’s car. But what about DWI? If an officer arrests a driver for DWI and secures the driver in the officer’s cruiser, may the officer search the driver’s vehicle because it is reasonable to believe that evidence of impaired driving will be found in the vehicle? Yes, at least on the facts before it, ruled the Court of Appeals of North Carolina in State v. Martinez, __ N.C. App. __, 795 S.E.2d 386 (2016). This post summarizes Martinez and considers searches incident to DWI arrests more broadly.

I have a “friend” whose teenage son was caught using his cell phone in class. The teacher saw him using it and took the phone. She looked at the phone when she picked it up and saw displayed on its screen a snapchat from another student in the class. So she took the other student’s phone too. My friend wanted to know what the teacher’s options were after that. Could she search the contents of the cell phones she had seized?