Sports fans across the country were shocked this week to learn that for several years the FBI and federal prosecutors have been investigating what one prosecutor has described as “the dark underbelly of college basketball.” As part of an investigation that may reveal widespread corruption, federal criminal complaints against several people associated with various college basketball teams were made public on Tuesday. The story is complex and still developing, but a New York Times article says that “two broad schemes” have been alleged. One involves assistant coaches who allegedly were bribed to persuade players to use certain financial advisors after turning pro. The other involves Adidas secretly giving money to certain players and their families in exchange for the players’ commitments to play at Adidas-sponsored schools. Keep reading for more news.
Costs “Not Assessed”
Under G.S. 7A-304(a), when a defendant is convicted, court costs “shall be assessed,” unless the court waives them pursuant to a written order determining that there is just cause to do so. Assess or waive—those are, in general, the statutory options. They are not, however, the only things that happen in real life. We can see in the AOC’s annual report on court cost waivers (discussed and linked here) that there are other possible outcomes, including costs being flagged as “not assessed.” That is the subject of today’s post.
Want to Know about Judicial Selection? Learn from the Best.
A group of district court judges gathered at the School last week for a class focused on the establishment of school justice partnerships, a central component of the Raise the Age legislation. The class was productive, but there was an elephant in the room that kept distracting everyone. If you’ve been keeping up with the General Assembly’s work over the past month, you likely can call the elephant by name.
News Roundup
Over the weekend a Georgia Tech student was shot and killed by a campus police officer in a tragic incident that set off protests on the school’s campus this week. 21-year-old student Scout Schultz was shot by 23-year-old campus police officer Tyler Beck on Saturday night. Reports suggest that Schultz, who had some history of mental illness, may have orchestrated the shooting, reportedly calling 911 to falsely report an armed suspicious person and then advancing on responding officers while carrying a multi-tool and disregarding their orders to stop. A few days after the shooting, a campus vigil held in remembrance of Shultz was followed by what has been described as a violent protest where a police car was set on fire and two officers were injured. Keep reading for more news.
G.S. 90-96(a) Is Mandatory Unless both the Judge and the State Say No
I wrote a post in July asking whether conditional discharge under G.S. 90-96(a) is discretionary or mandatory for a consenting defendant. A case decided this week offers some clarification.
Serial, Cell Site Location Information, and Experts . . . on a Wednesday
It’s not Thursday, but I’m going to throw it back a few years to 2014. Like the rest of the nerds I know, I became obsessed that year with the podcast Serial. The first season of that podcast chronicled the prosecution of Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Host Sarah Koenig meticulously sifted through the evidence and conducted goodness-knows-how-many interviews with everyone connected to the case, including numerous recorded interviews with Syed, who is serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison. Syed claims that he did not kill Lee, whose body was discovered six weeks after she disappeared buried in a Baltimore park. Koenig spends the first several episodes of the podcast describing inconsistencies in witness’s accounts of the day Lee disappeared—inconsistencies that raise doubts about Syed’s guilt. But in episode five, Koenig, with the help of her producer, analyzes the evidence that the State offered regarding which cell towers serviced calls to Syed’s phone during the time that one of Syed’s friends claimed Syed was burying Lee’s body. The producer concludes:
“I think they were probably in [the park] . . . Because . . . the amount of luck that you would have to have to make up a story like that and then have the cell phone records corroborate those key points, I just don’t think that that’s possible.”
Misdemeanor Attorneys Come to the SOG
Last week we hosted nearly 30 mostly new attorneys for the Misdemeanor Defender program. The training takes place here every fall, and focuses on preparing attorneys for handling cases at the district court level. If you’d like to know more about our indigent defense education programs, jump to the end of this post to find out about available training materials and future trainings.
Facial Recognition, Biometric Identification, and the Fifth Amendment
Apple just introduced the iPhone X, a new high-end smartphone. The phone can be unlocked using facial recognition, just as current iPhones can be unlocked using a fingerprint scanner. According to Forbes, the phone “uses a combination of light projectors and sensors to take several images of your facial features,” then compares the face of a person seeking to unlock the phone to the “depth map” it has created.
I wrote here and here about the Fifth Amendment implications of fingerprint scanners. The few courts that have addressed the issue have mostly agreed that a suspect can’t be required to provide the passcode to a phone, absent unusual circumstances, because that would violate the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination. However, courts mostly have held that a suspect may be ordered to press a finger to the phone because doing so is not “testimonial” and so is outside the scope of the privilege.
I thought that this would be a good time to consider facial recognition and the Fifth Amendment, and to provide an update on a recent case that reaches a different result than most other decisions to date.
News Roundup
A shooting at a high school near Spokane, Washington, on Wednesday morning left one student dead and three others injured. Caleb Sharpe, a sophomore at Freeman High School, is accused of killing fellow student Sam Strahan and wounding three other students. Reportedly armed with an AR-15 rifle and a handgun, Sharpe is said to have opened fire in a hallway just before classes were scheduled to begin. A report from local paper The Spokesman-Review says that Sharpe began the attack with the rifle, which soon jammed. He then began firing the handgun before being tackled and disarmed by a school custodian. The story was developing at the time of writing. Keep reading for more news.