North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Search warrant applications are often based on information from confidential informants. Whether the informant is reliable is critical. Information from a reliable informant is often sufficient to establish probable cause, while information from an informant whose reliability isn’t established is often insufficient. So how’s a magistrate to know whether an informant is reliable? A recent opinion from the court of appeals provides an opportunity to examine that question.

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The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, on a rehearing of a case en banc, held in United States v. Robinson, 2017 WL 280727 (Jan. 23, 2017), that an officer had the authority to conduct a frisk of a lawfully-stopped person whom the officer reasonably believed to be armed with a concealed firearm, regardless of whether the person may have been legally entitled to carry the firearm. This post discusses the ruling and its possible influence in the development of the law of frisk in North Carolina state courts. [For those who received my summary of this case as a subscriber to the criminal law listserv, this is the same summary but with the addition of an analysis and comment section at the end of this post.]

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My colleagues here have previously blogged about the impact of Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. ___, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), and my predecessor Alyson Grine created a handy chart summarizing North Carolina cases on the matter, found here. Rodriguez of course held that a traffic stop may not be extended beyond the time necessary to accomplish the purpose of the stop, absent reasonable suspicion or consent, and effectively overruled prior case law in NC allowing de minimis extensions of such stops. In December, the Court of Appeals issued a new, unanimous decision applying this rule in State v. Miller, ___ N.C. App. ____ (Dec. 20, 2016), temp. stay allowed, ___ N.C. ___ (Jan. 4, 2017). I found it noteworthy for the role that the officer’s body-camera footage played, as well as for the fact that the court applied plain error review to grant the defendant a new trial. 

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On December 21, 2016, the North Carolina Supreme Court in State v. Allman upheld a magistrate’s finding of probable cause to search a home for drugs, and it reversed a contrary ruling in this case by the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The Allman ruling is the subject of this post.

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Can a court order a suspect to use the suspect’s fingerprint to unlock his or her smartphone? Or would that violate the suspect’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination? I wrote about that issue here. This post updates the previous one with two new cases and some additional discussion.

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The North Carolina Supreme Court in State v. Lowe (December 21, 2016) ruled that a search warrant validly authorized a search of a vehicle parked on the driveway of the premises and within its curtilage, and it reversed a contrary ruling by the Court of Appeals (State v. Lowe, 774 S.E.2d 893, 21 July 2015). This post discusses the supreme court’s ruling.

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Joshua Wilson had just pulled his truck out of the driveway of a residence in Burlington when he saw a police car parked in the road in front of him. A uniformed officer had gotten out of the car and was walking toward the residence. When the officer saw Wilson, he waived his hands back and forth in the air to tell Wilson to stop his car. Wilson stopped. The officer approached the truck on the driver’s side. The window was down, and he smelled the odor of alcohol. Wilson was arrested shortly thereafter for driving while impaired. The question on appeal was whether he was seized by the officer when he stopped his truck.

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The new edition of Arrest, Search, and Investigation in North Carolina, Fifth Edition, 2016 is now available. Continue reading for additional information.

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The police can fly a plane over your house and look down to see whether you are growing marijuana in your backyard. California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986). But can the police fly a plane over everyone’s house, all the time, and record everything visible from the sky? This isn’t a law school hypothetical.

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Although reasonable suspicion requires less evidence than probable cause and often is not a difficult standard for an officer to satisfy to make an investigative stop, the standard requires an articulation of facts that is more than a mere hunch or suspicion. An example of the latter is last week’s North Carolina Court of Appeals opinion in State v. Watson (November 15, 2016), which ruled that an officer lacked reasonable suspicion to make a vehicle stop for illegal drugs. This post discusses the reasonable suspicion standard as applied in this case.

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