Latest posts in category Uncategorized on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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.

On Monday morning, the FBI executed a series of search warrants at the home, office, and hotel room of Michael Cohen, a personal attorney for President Donald Trump and a former executive at the Trump Organization.  News reports say that the warrants were sought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York based on a referral by the Office of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, and that Cohen is under investigation for bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations.  Keep reading for more news. 

Today’s post is a little bit different from our usual fare. It doesn’t analyze a recent case or answer a frequently asked question. Instead, it is a message from Mike […]

I was on a plane recently, listening to the usual safety briefing, when I heard the flight attendant say that “it is a violation of federal law” to ignore illuminated safety signs, such as the “fasten seat belt” sign. I was surprised because, on another flight, I had overheard a flight attendant tell a passenger who wanted to use the bathroom while the “fasten seat belt” sign was illuminated that she couldn’t authorize him to get out of his seat but that she wouldn’t stop him either. The sense I got from that previous exchange was that the sign was essentially a recommendation. So, I decided to look into it.

Wednesday was the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the country has celebrated his legacy this week while also reflecting on our national obligation to continue to work towards a society of equal justice.  The Associated Press has republished selections of its contemporaneous coverage of King’s assassination, and the News Hour aired a segment discussing King’s enduring influence on campaigns for civil rights.  Keep reading for more news.

The hunt for a serial bomber in Austin, Texas, who killed two people and injured several others with homemade package bombs was this week’s leading national criminal law news story.  After a weeks-long investigation involving state and federal law enforcement agencies, authorities came to suspect that 23-year-old Mark Conditt was the bomber.  As officers closed in on Conditt, he killed himself by detonating a bomb inside his vehicle.  The New York Times has an article describing the meticulous police work that cracked the case, and the Austin Statesman has full coverage of the terrifying bombing spree.  Keep reading for more news.

Students across the country walked out of class for 17 minutes at 10:00 a.m. Wednesday morning in a mass protest against gun violence in the wake of the school shooting in Florida last month.  The demonstration came exactly one month after the shooting and the 17-minute duration represents the 17 people who were killed.  At Columbine High School in Colorado, students added 13 minutes to their protest to represent the victims of the 1999 shooting at that school.  Keep reading for more news.