Culling Feral Swine from Aircraft
Every year as I do presentations about new criminal law legislation, a smaller piece of legislation catches my eye. Invariably as I look into the legislation, I learn about the […]
What Can a Judge Say About Football Players’ Protests?
In a recent interview with Katie Couric, Justice Ginsburg discussed San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his practice of kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. She […]
News Roundup
Hurricane Matthew hit Eastern North Carolina hard over the weekend. Twenty North Carolinians lost their lives and many communities experienced severe flooding. The Fayetteville Observer has extensive coverage of the […]
Sentencing Whiteboard: Active Sentences for Aggravated Level One DWI
Today’s post is a return to the Sentencing Whiteboard, this time to explain active sentences for aggravated level one DWI. As Shea and I have discussed in earlier posts (here, here, […]
The Road to Zero
Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported an estimated 10 percent increase in traffic fatalities for the first six months of 2016. NHTSA’s report was based […]
Drug Users, Drug Sellers, and Probable Cause
Here’s a common fact pattern: Officers find a person in possession of drugs. The officers say, in effect, “we won’t arrest you if you’ll tell us who sold you the […]
What Constitutes Valid Consent When One Co-Occupant Consents and the Other Co-Occupant Does Not?
Generally, officers may obtain a valid consent to search only from a person whose reasonable expectation of privacy may be invaded by the proposed search. Sometimes two or more people—for […]
News Roundup
Reuters reported this week that Yahoo “secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.” Reuters says […]
North Carolina’s Voting Restriction for Felons
Almost all states place some limitation on felons’ right to vote. Those limitations—which can be traced from ancient political traditions of “civil death” for certain crimes to more recent history […]
Caught on Camera
Surveillance camera footage of crime scenes often helps law enforcement officers identify an unknown perpetrator. This kind of footage can be equally powerful at trial, convincing jurors that the person […]