North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Late last week a familiar national tragedy played out in Santa Fe, Texas, where a teenager, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, went to his high school armed with a shotgun and a pistol and killed ten people, many of them fellow students.  Pagourtzis was taken into custody and charged with ten counts of murder and various other offenses.  Most of the details will sound numbingly familiar: Pagourtzis kept to himself; his father owned the weapons legally; the school was prepared; Democrats called for gun control; Republicans called for more effective security measures and mental health services; American students are afraid to go to school.  Keep reading for more news.

Michigan State University reached a $500 million settlement this week with the hundreds of women that Larry Nassar sexually abused under the guide of medical treatment while working in the gymnastics community.  The New York Times says that the settlement is the largest ever in a sexual abuse case involving an American university.  Lawsuits against U.S.A. Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic Committee, and other organizations still are pending.  Nassar worked at Michigan State for 20 years, and some of his victims have said that the university ignored complaints about his behavior dating back to at least the late 90’s.  Keep reading for more news.

On Monday, the New Yorker reported that four women have accused New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of inflicting physical violence and other abuse upon them in the context of romantic relationships.  The allegations have received significant national attention, in part because Schneiderman has presented himself publicly as a staunch supporter of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and abuse.  Schneiderman issued a statement contesting the allegations, but resigned from office within hours of the story’s publication; he is now under criminal investigation.  Keep reading for more news.

Yesterday I went to Lillington to teach a class for the inmates in the North Carolina prison system’s Sex Offender Accountability and Responsibility (SOAR) program. I’d like to share a little bit about what I taught—and what I learned.

May a law enforcement officer submit an application for an investigative order to a judicial official, or does that constitute the unauthorized practice of law? The answer depends on the type of order sought, as a letter of caution issued last week by the State Bar’s Authorized Practice Committee reveals.

Late last week a Pennsylvania jury convicted Bill Cosby of three counts of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004.  A prior trial involving the same offenses ended in a deadlocked jury mistrial.  Cosby faces up to 30 years in prison, but news reports suggest that he is unlikely to receive the maximum sentence.  Cosby has faced years of accusations that he had a regular practice of drugging and sexually assaulting women.  Keep reading for more news.

When a search warrant application fails to establish probable cause, the problem isn’t normally that the applicant didn’t have probable cause. It’s that the applicant failed to include important facts that he or she knew. An example of the phenomenon is State v. Lewis, decided this week by the court of appeals.

Two incidents of mass murder made national headlines this week, one occurred in Nashville, Tennessee, and the other in Toronto, Canada.  Early Sunday morning, Travis Reinking killed four people and wounded two others with an AR-15 style rifle at a Waffle House in Nashville.  After being disarmed by a customer, Reinking fled the scene, sparking a 34-hour manhunt that ended when he was discovered in a wooded area a few miles from the Waffle House.  On Monday, Alek Minassian killed ten people and wounded many others by intentionally driving a moving van into pedestrians on a sidewalk in Toronto.  Keep reading for more news.

Last week, the Court of Appeals of North Carolina decided State v. Frederick, a case about whether a controlled purchase of drugs provided probable cause to issue a search warrant. Before you say “the answer is yes, that fact pattern happens all the time,” be aware that Frederick presents a wrinkle. The wrinkle is that the controlled buy was conducted not by a confidential informant, but by an unknown “middleman” who the informant drove to the suspect’s home. Does the injection of an intermediary undermine probable cause? Read on to find out!

Seven inmates were killed and many others were wounded during a prison riot in South Carolina on Sunday night.  Columbia newspaper The State reports that a disagreement over gang territory and contraband erupted into a massive and violent fight that spanned three dormitories at Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security facility located between Columbia and Florence.  The report from The State paints a bleak picture of Lee Correctional and other South Carolina prisons, saying that the state’s prisons as a whole “are rife with violence, illegal weapons, and gangs.”  The incident is the nation’s deadliest prison riot in 25 years.  Keep reading for more news.