North Carolina Criminal Law

I wrote a paper about motor vehicle checkpoints last year. It’s available here. Once in a while, I get asked about so-called ruse checkpoints, a subject that I didn’t address […]

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The curtilage of a home is the area “directly and intimately connected with the [home] and in proximity” to it. State v. Courtright, 60 N.C. App. 247 (1983). In other […]

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided Kentucky v. King, a case that addresses — actually, eviscerates — the officer-created exigency doctrine. The facts are as follows: Officers investigating possible drug crimes […]

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Last week, I posted a paper about warrantless searches of computers and electronic devices. Today, I’m posting its companion: this paper about warrant searches of computers, which I have just […]

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I’ve had a couple of questions recently about something that I’d never considered before: whether a guest has “standing” to contest a search of the outbuildings associated with a host’s […]

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I keep a list of cases from across the country on warrantless searches of computers and other electronic devices. It covers topics like searches of cellular phones incident to arrest, […]

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This recent post by Professor Orin Kerr reports on an emerging split of authority on what the state needs to show about the training and experience of a drug-sniffing dog […]

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Remember United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544 (D.C. Cir. 2010)? That’s the drug case in which the D.C. Circuit held that “prolonged GPS monitoring [of a suspect] defeats an […]

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Or, Seeking Dismissal Based on the State’s Destruction of Evidence Unpublished court of appeals opinions occasionally assume the cache of bootleg recordings of live performances of the Grateful Dead. If […]

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The Fourth Circuit recently decided a very interesting case with a lot of North Carolina connections. The case is United States v. Foster, and it’s available here. The facts were […]

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