Recent Blog Posts Page 240 | North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Around here, the biggest news item this week was the shooting of Walter Scott by North Charleston, South Carolina police officer Michael Slager. Scott, who is black, ran from a traffic stop, perhaps because he was afraid of being jailed for being delinquent on child support payments. It appears that Slager, who is white, gave chase on foot and caught Scott. Some type of scuffle ensued. Slager at least initially claimed that Scott sought to obtain control of his Taser during the struggle. A bystander captured video of the last moments of the scuffle, which ended with Scott breaking free of Slager and running away, apparently unarmed. Slager fired eight shots at Scott’s back as he fled, killing Scott. Slager has been fired from his job and charged with murder. CNN has the story here.

The incident has given a renewed impetus to the push to equip officers with body cameras. At least two bills are pending in the North Carolina General Assembly regarding cameras. The News and Observer discusses both bills in this article. H537 appears to have the better prospects, as it has attracted some Republican support. It would provide $10 million over the next two years to help fund the acquisition of cameras and generally would require all officers in counties with populations over 200,000 to wear cameras and record specified interactions with the public. A News and Observer editorial supporting the bill claims that the bill would cover about 60% of the state’s officers.

From time to time, I am asked about the right of private citizens to initiate criminal charges by approaching a magistrate. The arrest warrant statute, G.S. 15A-304, requires only that a magistrate be “supplied with sufficient information, supported by oath or affirmation” to find probable cause. The statute doesn’t limit the source of that information to law enforcement officers. As most readers know, it is common in North Carolina for private citizens to seek the issuance of an arrest warrant or a summons.

I have long thought that this was a distinctive feature of North Carolina law, but it seems to be somewhat more common than I believed.

Like most states, North Carolina has not substantially implemented the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). (Only 17 states have.) Nevertheless, some portions of the federal law wind up impacting sex offenders in North Carolina. As discussed in previous posts, as a matter of existing state law, a judge may not grant a petition for removal from the sex offender registry if doing so would violate the “federal Jacob Wetterling Act, as amended, and any other standards applicable to the termination of a registration requirement or required to be met as a condition for the receipt of federal funds by the State.” G.S. 14-208.12A(a1)(2). With that requirement in place, federal rules regarding minimum registration period effectively trump the state-law regime allowing a non-lifetime registrant to petition for removal 10 years after the date of initial county registration. The minimum registration periods under federal law are 15 years for so-called “Tier I” offenses (reducible to 10 years in certain circumstances), 25 years for “Tier II” offenses, and life for “Tier III” offenses.

That longwinded introduction brings me to the real purpose of today’s post. To apply the state law referencing federal law correctly, you need to know the tier into which the registrant’s reportable offense would fall. Federal law defines the tiers mostly by reference to federal crimes. In today’s post I will summarize the federal laws and regulations regarding tiering, including all of the relevant definitions of qualifying acts.

Author’s Note:  This post has been modified from its original version in response to a helpful comment by a reader.

An officer sees a man drink from a can of beer while the man drives through a public parking deck. The officer stops the man’s car and sees the beer bottle can in plain view. He then asks the man to step out of the vehicle. May the officer open the car’s console to search for additional evidence?

Drones are remote-controlled aircraft. They can be equipped with cameras, and may be useful for surveillance. Does the use of drones by law enforcement officers raise any legal concerns?

The short answer is yes, in at least four ways.

Friday is a University holiday, so we’re rounding the news up one day early this week. Despite the short week, there is plenty of criminal law news to report.

Prosecuting impaired drivers in Georgia just got a little bit harder. The Georgia Supreme Court held last week in Williams v. State, __ S.E.2d __ (Ga. 2015) that the mere fact that a DUI suspect agreed to allow officers to withdraw his blood–after being told that Georgia law required him to submit to testing and that his driver’s license would be revoked for a year if he refused–did not establish the sort of voluntary consent necessary to excuse the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Is this a watershed moment in implied consent law?

It’s time to post an updated sex offender and monitoring flow chart. I was going to do it last week, but I’m glad I didn’t. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed North Carolina’s appellate courts on an issue that may impact the constitutionality of SBM. The new chart, available here, incorporates Grady v. North Carolina and includes several other changes.

I’ve had several questions about the role of drug dogs at motor vehicle checkpoints. The details are below, but a quick summary of the law is as follows:

(1) Officers can’t lawfully run drug dogs around every vehicle stopped at a checkpoint

(2) Officers can lawfully run drug dogs around cars that are pulled out of line for additional investigation, so long as the use of dog doesn’t substantially lengthen the stop

195 new bills were filed in the North Carolina Senate yesterday, the deadline for filing new bills in that chamber this session. I haven’t reviewed all the new bills – or all the bills filed before yesterday, for that matter.  But a few items of interest include:

• SB 520, which would expand the state’s indecent exposure law, possibly in response to the recent incident in Charlotte that I noted here
• SB 579, which would allow the Commissioner of Agriculture to regulate concealed carry at the State Fair
• SB 589, which would amend the habitual felon laws in a way that appears to be intended to clarify that previous convictions from New Jersey, which uses the term “crime” rather than “felony” as discussed here, would count
• SB 613, the short title of which is “Prohibit Discriminatory Profiling”
• SB 619, “Grey’s Law,” which would make various changes related to impaired driving and which I surmise is named after the DOT employee struck and killed just a few days ago
• SB 641, which would expand eligibility for concealed handgun permits and limit sheriffs’ authority to investigate applicants and to impose application requirements not set forth in the statute
• SB 684, which would require a judge considering a defendant’s proposed waiver of a jury trial to ask for and consider the State’s position, and determine whether the waiver is being “tendered in good faith and is not a tactic to procure an otherwise impermissible procedural advantage”

Of course, I should not omit mention of SB 559, which would make the Linville Caverns Spider the official state spider.