Sufficiency vs. Admissibility: Drug I.D. after State v. Osborne
In August, the North Carolina Supreme Court weighed in on drug identification once again in State v. Osborne, ___ N.C. ___ (August 16, 2019). I wrote about the earlier Court […]
Citation Versus Arrest by North Carolina Law Enforcement Officers: A County-Level Analysis
Editor’s Note: This post was written by Professor Jessica Smith and graduate research assistant Ross Hatton. Charged with identifying best practices and offering recommendations on how policing practices can promote […]
News Roundup
As the Charlotte Observer reports, former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr. died on Thursday after a period of deteriorating health. The Observer report notes that […]
Satellite-Based Monitoring Is Unconstitutional for All Unsupervised Recidivists
The Supreme Court of North Carolina held in State v. Grady, ___ N.C. ___ (2019), that satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders is unconstitutional as applied to any unsupervised person […]
When Victims’ and Defendants’ Rights Collide in Court, Who Wins?
While I was finishing up my post last Wednesday on Senate Bill 682 (the bill implementing the 2018 constitutional amendments expanding victims’ rights), the Governor was signing that bill into […]
Is a Written Transcript the “Best Evidence” of a Recording?
Shocking videos on sites like Faceboook Live may dominate the headlines (see examples here and here), but criminal attorneys know that the humble, old-fashioned audio recording still plays a large […]
What Risk Assessment Validation Tells Us about Pretrial Failures: They’re Lower than We Think
Suppose I told you that we could categorize defendants into six categories for risk of failure to appear (FTA) in court as required, with 1 being the lowest risk category […]
News Roundup
At the time of writing Hurricane Dorian was approaching the North Carolina coast and many communities were under evacuation orders. The Department of Public Safety’s storm information website, listing evacuation […]
Case Summaries–Fourth Circuit Decisions (August 2019)
This post summarizes decisions published during August 2019 by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that are of interest to state practitioners.
Victims’ Rights Bill Sent to Governor
Author’s note: Senate Bill 682 was signed by the Governor on September 4, 2019, and was chaptered as S.L. 2019-216. Last week, the General Assembly ratified Senate Bill 682, which […]