North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

WRAL reports that Durham police announced yesterday that they recently made an arrest in a sexual assault case that occurred more than four years ago.  In November 2015, a woman was attacked and sexually assaulted while walking home from work on the Ellerbe Creek Trail.  The WRAL report says that investigators were unable to develop strong leads in the case until last fall, when they submitted DNA from the rape kit for testing.  That test connected the DNA to Emanuel Dwayne Burch, whose DNA profile was in a national database.  The State Crime Lab then connected the DNA in the kit to a new sample taken from Burch.  Keep reading for more news.

Local jails are an important part of the state’s criminal justice system. Jails house, among others, individuals held pretrial, serving sentences, and held for federal and other authorities. In this report and in the accompanying spreadsheet (here), we provide information about North Carolina jail occupancy rates. Among other things, we find that:

• 50% of counties exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2018; and
• 64% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2018.

When a person suspected of driving while impaired is involved in a crash and receives medical treatment, the State may wish to obtain the person’s medical records for use in criminal prosecution. What standards and procedures govern the disclosure of such records?

On Tuesday, officials in Winston-Salem held a press conference announcing coordinated efforts to deter gun violence in the city.  As the Winston-Salem Journal reports, there were more homicides in Winston in 2019 than in any other year in the past quarter century.  Chief of Police Catrina Thompson, Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough, District Attorney Jim O’Neal, U.S. Attorney Matt Martin, Mayor Allen Joines, and Councilman James Taylor all spoke at the press conference, with Thompson saying that they would “use every one of the resources [they] have” to pursue individuals involved in violent crime.  Keep reading for more information about the efforts in Winston and other criminal law news.

This post summarizes opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on January 21, 2020.

As the New York Times reports, Attorney General William Barr said this week that a shooting at a naval air station in Pensacola, Florida, last month was an act of terrorism and asked Apple to unlock two iPhones used by the shooter.  In early December, a Saudi Air Force cadet training in Florida, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, killed three sailors and wounded eight others after opening fire in a classroom where he was training with the U.S. military to become a pilot.  Attorney General Barr said that Apple had not provided substantive assistance in accessing Alshamrani’s iPhones but Apple disputed that claim, saying that it had been working with the FBI since the shooting occurred and had given investigators access to his iCloud account and other data.  As the Times report notes, the standoff is reminiscent of a 2016 case where Apple refused to break the encryption of a phone used by a shooter in a California terror attack.  Keep reading for more news. 

This post summarizes criminal and related decisions published by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in December, 2019. Decisions of interest to state practitioners will be posted on a monthly basis. Previous Fourth Circuit case summaries are available here.

Among the most significant North Carolina criminal news stories last year was the tragic shooting on the campus of UNC Charlotte that killed two students, Reed Parlier and Riley Howell, and injured four others.  This week, the Charlotte Observer reports the proposal of a $1 million permanent memorial and reflection space to commemorate and remember the victims of the attack. Keep reading for more information about the memorial and other news.

This post summarizes published criminal opinions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals decided yesterday, Jan. 7, 2020.

I want to kick off 2020 by welcoming Tim Heinle to the School of Government. It is his first week on the job as our new Civil Defender Educator. Here he is in his new office at the School. You can reach him at 919.962.9594 or heinle@sog.unc.edu. Tim will assist defenders in the diverse and challenging practice areas that make up civil indigent defense in North Carolina, including abuse, neglect, and dependency cases, guardianship, and child support contempt proceedings.