“Big brother invasion of privacy or pro-active policing? That’s the question after a new report revealed seven North Carolina universities use or have used powerful social media-monitoring programs to keep an eye on everything from campus protests to student well-being to drugs.” So begins this WRAL story about Social Sentinel, a product used by some campus police departments to track student social media posts that may indicate potential unrest or criminal activity. Duke, UNC, and NC State are among the institutions named in the story. The reporter who led the investigation is a former UNC student who became interested in the topic during the Silent Sam protests on campus. Keep reading for more news. Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
This post summarizes criminal and related decisions published by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals during August 2022. Cases of interest to state practitioners are summarized monthly. Previous Fourth Circuit case summaries are available here. Continue reading →
Category: Uncategorized
Suppose an officer conducts a traffic stop. During the stop, the officer gets a hunch that the driver may have drugs in the car. Can the officer ask the driver for consent to search the car? Even without reasonable suspicion? Does the time it takes to ask for consent, or the time it takes to conduct the search, unlawfully extend the stop? I’ll try to answer these important questions in this post. Continue reading →
Category: Motor Vehicles, Search and Seizure, Uncategorized | Tags: consent, consent to search, fourth amendment, Parker, rodriguez, Search and Seizure, traffic stops
“An Iowa teenage sex trafficking victim who stabbed her rapist to death was sentenced by a judge on Tuesday to five years of closely supervised probation and must pay $150,000 restitution to her abuser’s family.” So reports Fox News here. The teen was a 15-year-old runaway when she began being trafficked for sex. She was allegedly forced at knifepoint to have sex with the man she killed. He fell asleep after the rape, then she stabbed him 37 times. She was charged with first-degree murder but pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The judge noted that the restitution payment was mandatory under state law. CNN has this follow-up story, which says that the teen “is just one of several teenagers – often of color – who have been legally penalized or convicted of killing their sex trafficker or assaulter in recent years in the US.” It also notes that a GoFundMe campaign has raised over $388,000 for the young woman in question. Continue reading →
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: news
A new case from the Supreme Court of North Carolina gives us a chance to revisit the issue of a defendant’s confrontation rights at a probation violation hearing. Continue reading →
Category: Sentencing, Uncategorized | Tags: confrontation, probation, probation violations, sixth amendment
When an officer attaches a video camera to a utility pole and uses it to monitor a suspect’s home continuously for several months, is that a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment? Or is it just the officer seeing what any passer-by might see, such that there is no intrusion on the suspect’s reasonable expectation of privacy? This issue has been a focal point of litigation since Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___, 138 S.Ct. 2206 (2018), which held that the long-term collection of historical cell site location information is so intrusive that it is a search, even though any individual piece of such data does not belong to the phone’s user and is not subject to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Whether the rationale of Carpenter extends to pole cameras has been addressed before on this blog, most recently here and here by Shea Denning. But there are a number of new cases in this area, which I have summarized below. Continue reading →
Queen Elizabeth II died this week. When she took the throne, Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Harry Truman was the President of the United States. She was truly an institution. And, to draw at least a slight connection to criminal law, she was an institution that could not be prosecuted. As The Guardian explains here, British law provides near-total immunity to the monarch. King Charles now enjoys that protection. Read on for more news. Continue reading →
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: news
The news story I pondered the most this week was this AP article entitled Watering While Black. It explores the arrest of a Black pastor in Alabama who was tending a neighbor’s flowers while the neighbor was away. A third neighbor called the police, seemingly failing to recognize the pastor even though he had lived on the same street for years. Officers responded and soon got sideways with the pastor. The whole situation fell apart through a series of faulty inferences and failed communications that put me in mind of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers. Read on for more news. Continue reading →
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: news
Kenly is a small town with a population just under 2,000. It made national news recently when the chief and all the full-time officers in the Kenly Police Department resigned. It sounds like Kenly is planning to rebuild its police department. But that isn’t mandatory. For now, the Johnston County Sheriff’s Office is providing law enforcement services in Kenly, and Kenly could choose to do without a police department on a permanent basis. In fact, there are hundreds of municipalities in North Carolina that don’t have their own police departments. This post highlights some of the considerations for small towns thinking about whether or not to have a police department. Continue reading →
On Monday, a grand jury in Wake County returned a presentment against Attorney General Josh Stein and two people affiliated with his 2020 electoral campaign. The presentment asked the Wake County District Attorney to “submit for grand jury consideration an indictment” charging a violation of G.S. 163-274(a)(9), which makes it a misdemeanor to “publish . . . derogatory reports with reference to any candidate in any primary or election, knowing such report to be false or in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity, when such report is calculated or intended to affect the chances of such candidate for nomination or election.” The basis of the presentment is a television ad run by Attorney General Stein’s campaign during the 2020 election cycle, accusing Stein’s opponent, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, of leaving “1,500 rape kits on a shelf.” On Tuesday, a divided panel of the Fourth Circuit enjoined further state court proceedings pending resolution of a federal lawsuit filed by the Attorney General’s campaign and related parties, claiming that the statute at issue violates the First Amendment. The issuance of the injunction pending appeal indicates that the panel believes the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits, but the matter is to be briefed expeditiously and argued in December. Keep reading for more news. Continue reading →
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: news
