North Carolina Criminal Law

The United States Supreme Court held in Missouri v. McNeely, 133 S. Ct. 1552 (2013), that the natural dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in […]

Read post

Ebola’s been in the news lately, with several infected individuals on American soil. New York and New Jersey have begun to quarantine individuals arriving from West Africa who have had […]

Read post

This weekend, the Charlotte Observer ran this article, entitled Charlotte Police Investigators Secretly Track Cellphones. The article concerns the use of so-called stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers or cell […]

Read post

Sorting out Fourth Amendment issues in the context of warrantless stops can be tricky. I like to break the case down into five basic questions.

Read post

The 2014 Cumulative Supplement to Arrest, Search, and Investigation in North Carolina (4th ed. 2011) is now available. It is called a cumulative supplement because it includes the material in […]

Read post

Apple recently announced new iPhones and a new operating system for its mobile devices. Amidst the hubbub, Apple also revealed that the new operating system would render it impossible for […]

Read post

Portable breath tests don’t go very far anymore in proving whether a suspect is impaired from alcohol.  That’s because the legislature amended G.S. 20-16.3(d) in 2006 to provide that the […]

Read post

Detectives investigating the rape and murder of an elderly woman in Shelby didn’t give up when suspect Donald Borders first refused to provide a sample of his DNA.  They asked […]

Read post

In Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), the Supreme Court ruled that a motor vehicle may be searched incident to the arrest of a recent occupant “only if [1] […]

Read post

The court of appeals recently decided a case about when a pedestrian’s efforts to avoid an officer provide reasonable suspicion for an investigative stop. The type of encounter involved is […]

Read post