A UNC School of Government Blog
In Arizona v. Gant, __ U.S. __, 129 S. Ct. 1710 (2009), the Supreme Court held that an officer may search an arrestee’s vehicle incident to arrest only if the arrestee is unsecured and “within reaching distance of the passenger compartment” or “it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of … Read more
I blogged here about the court of appeals’ opinion in State v. Davis, ___ N.C. App. ___ (2010), a case in which the defendant was convicted of several offenses and sentenced to more than 35 years imprisonment for driving while impaired and crashing his truck into another truck, killing two people and seriously injuring a … Read more
About two years ago, I wrote a paper on GPS tracking. It’s available here. There have been a couple of major decisions in the area recently, so this post is a bit of an update to my earlier work. I wrote in the paper that “[m]ost, but not all” courts have found that when the … Read more
Last Friday, after years of litigation and months of deliberation, the Supreme Court of North Carolina issued its decision in Jones v. Keller. The case resolves the question of what sentence reduction credits, if any, apply to a group of life-sentenced inmates who were sentenced at a time when G.S. 14-2 read that a “sentence … Read more
In 2009 the General Assembly ordered the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Department of Correction to study the feasibility of conducting presentence investigations on “all offenders convicted of felonies for which the sentencing judge has the option of intermediate or active punishments.” S.L. 2009-451, sec. 19.14. The study was completed earlier this year, … Read more
Earlier posts (here, here, and here) discuss the statutory and constitutional requirements for obtaining a sample of a defendant’s blood for analysis in an implied-consent case. This post likewise addresses blood draws in such cases but addresses two narrower issues. First, must the State establish that the blood was drawn by a qualified person before … Read more
Last week, the court of appeals decided State v. Yencer, ruling, in effect, that Davidson College may not operate its own police department. The ruling calls into serious question the authority of several other private universities’ police departments, meaning that it is of interest not only in Davidson, but also Durham (the website of the … Read more
As noted in an earlier post, I get asked a lot of questions about motions for appropriate relief (MARs). One procedural issue that causes some confusion is procedural default. The MAR statute provides that in order for a court to reach the merits of a defendant’s MAR, the defendant must satisfy certain procedural rules. If … Read more
In previous posts, my colleagues and I have discussed several of the noteworthy bills enacted by the General Assembly in the short session that concluded last month. For example, Jamie wrote about some developments in the law of sentencing and corrections here, I posted John Rubin’s summary of the new gun rights legislation here, and … Read more
The biggest criminal law story this week has to be the ongoing controversy over the SBI. Two independent reviewers examined the work of the Forensic Biology Section of the SBI lab — the section responsible for blood testing — and found 230 cases in which problems existed. In some cases, for example, “[l]aboratory test results … Read more