The Durham Herald Sun reports that after District Court Judge Fred Battaglia acquitted one defendant and dismissed charges against two others allegedly involved in destroying a Confederate monument in Durham last year, Durham District Attorney Roger Echols announced that his office was dropping all remaining charges arising from the incident. Echols said that because the evidence against the remaining defendants was the same as that introduced in the trials this week, it would be a misuse of state resources to continue to pursue the prosecutions. Keep reading for more news.
All the Jail Fees
I get a lot of questions about court costs and other monetary obligations. Jail fees seem to be a particular concern. Let’s talk about all the money that could change hands for every day an inmate spends in jail.
Defrauding an Older Adult is Its Own Kind of Crime
The art of swindling is as old as time, and governments have worked for centuries to combat the practice. Indeed, North Carolina first criminalized the obtaining of property by false pretenses in 1811. In more recent years, the legislature has focused on a set of victims who are especially vulnerable to financial fraud: older adults. Financial exploitation of such a person is its own kind of crime—a crime that may be subject to more severe punishment than other types of fraud and that encompasses a broader array of deceptive behavior. Assets obtained through such fraud may also be frozen or seized pending the resolution of the criminal case to ensure that the victim receives the restitution he or she is owed.
Think You Know Drug ID?
A considerable amount of digital ink has been expended on this blog discussing the rules for identifying drugs at trial and related issues, although it has been several years since we covered it. It’s an important and potentially dispositive issue in drug trials. Consider the following fact pattern:
The defendant is charged with possession of methamphetamine. During her arrest and processing, she tells the officer that she has “meth” on her person, which is seized by the officers. At trial, the officer testifies to her statement about the nature of the substance, and the alleged meth is itself introduced at trial. However, no chemical analysis is introduced, nor is there any expert testimony about the substance, and the defendant presents no evidence. At the close of the State’s evidence, the defendant moves to dismiss, arguing that the State failed to provide sufficient proof of the identity of the alleged drugs. Should the motion be allowed? Read on for the answer.
News Roundup
Yet again this week, our nation confronts the tragedy of a mass shooting. Nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of murder following an attack on Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Cruz was a student at the school but had been expelled. For perspective on where this incident falls among the more than 40 active shooter episodes at schools in the United States since 2000, 12 people were killed at Columbine and 26 were killed at Sandy Hook; two were killed last month in Kentucky. Three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have occurred in the last five months. Keep reading for more news.
Victim Impact Evidence at Sentencing
The recent sentencing hearings for U.S.A. Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar showed the power of victim impact testimony. Victim after victim testified about Nassar’s abuse and the harm it has caused. Today’s post covers the appropriateness of that type of testimony in North Carolina.
Obtaining and Admitting Evidence from a Vehicle’s Black Box
The number of people killed in motor vehicle crashes in the United States increased in by 5.6 percent from 2015 to 2016. In 2016, 37,461 people were killed in crashes on U.S. roadways, compared to 35,485 the previous year. North Carolina’s fatality figures followed the national trend, with fatalities increasing from 1,379 in 2015 to 1,450 in 2016, a 5.1 percent increase. Many such fatalities result in criminal vehicular homicide charges, which number in the hundreds each year in North Carolina alone.
Investigators and prosecutors in such cases are increasingly relying upon the vehicle itself to tell the story of what happened during and just before the crash. Many vehicles driven today (and nearly all manufactured in the past five years) are equipped with an Event Data Recorder (EDR) installed by the manufacturer. An EDR, often referred to as a car’s black box, contains data related to various aspects of the car’s operation seconds before a crash, including its speed, whether the brakes were applied, and the position of its gas pedal. This kind of evidence can play a central role in the State’s attempt to show culpably negligent driving. But how may the State lawfully obtain EDR information? And, once obtained, how may it be introduced into evidence?
Prosecutor for Hire?
Editor’s note: This is the first blog post by Jonathan Holbrook, who began working with the School of Government last July as our first Prosecutor Educator. Jonathan knows the field, having worked as a prosecutor for nearly 10 years, first in state court with the Wake County District Attorney’s Office, and then in federal court with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Please welcome him to the School – and to the blog.
I am truly honored to join the staff here at the School of Government, and excited to have this opportunity to help set the course for the new position of Prosecutor Educator. Over time, my role here will likely expand to include more training and advising, similar to the great work Phil Dixon currently does with defense attorneys in his capacity as the Defender Educator. But for now, my primary focus is on a large project related to the Prosecutors’ Trial Manual, which has not been updated since 2012. The manual is one of many works written and maintained by long-time faculty member Bob Farb, who retired from the School of Government last year. Rather than simply update and re-publish the existing manual, the School of Government (in consultation with an advisory committee of veteran prosecutors) is converting that material into a robust and searchable online knowledge base of North Carolina criminal procedure. This new resource will preserve the rich content and extensive research from the current manual, but in a format that is much easier to update, search, and navigate.
One of the benefits of engaging in this top-to-bottom revision of the old manual has been learning and re-learning all the nuts and bolts – and hidden gems – of North Carolina criminal procedure. The rest of this post focuses on an interesting topic that recently caught my eye, and which I think might be surprising to some readers as well.
Probable Cause and Child Pornography
Shea blogged last week about State v. Terrell, a case in which the defendant’s girlfriend saw on one of the defendant’s USB drives an “image of [the girlfriend’s] nine-year-old granddaughter sleeping without a shirt.” She called the police, and an officer found additional images of “partially or fully nude minors” on the drive. The officer sought and obtained a search warrant that led to the discovery of child pornography. Shea’s post, and the case itself, focused on the officer’s initial warrantless search and whether it was justified under the private search doctrine. But the court’s recitation of the facts reminded me of another common issue in child pornography cases: how much information about an image must an officer provide in order to establish probable cause that the image constitutes child pornography?
News Roundup
As the Associated press reports, last week United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a new policy regarding immigration arrests at courthouses. The policy appears to suggest that ICE primarily will enter courthouses to arrest specific “targeted aliens” who have criminal convictions, are gang members, pose a threat to public safety, have been ordered removed from the United States, or have illegally re-entered the country after being removed. The policy says that aliens encountered in the process of making an arrest of a targeted person, such as the target’s family members or friends, will not be arrested “absent special circumstances.” Keep reading for more news.