Recent Blog Posts Page 246 on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

One of the first bills introduced in 2015 legislative session (House Bill 6) defines a new type of passenger vehicle that is part-car, part-motorcycle—the autocycle. 

This week saw several interesting developments at the United States Supreme Court, plus the videotaped arrest of a public defender in the hallway of a courthouse.

Kathy Taft was bludgeoned and raped on March 5, 2010, as she lay in the bedroom of a friends’ home in Raleigh recovering from surgery.  She died four days later.  Raleigh police tracked down her killer, Jason Williford, through what then-police chief Harry Dolan called “gumshoe detective work”:  They collected and tested trash discarded by neighborhood men who refused to provide samples of their DNA.

I’ve recently updated my paper on traffic stops. As before, it covers stops from start to finish, including the legal standard for making a stop, the length of a stop, […]

A new publication, the North Carolina Sentencing Handbook with Felony, Misdemeanor, and DWI Sentencing Grids, 2014–2015, is available from the School of Government. The booklet updates last year’s North Carolina Structured Sentencing Handbook. Like its predecessor, it contains instructions on felony sentencing (including drug trafficking) and misdemeanor sentencing, the sentencing grids themselves, and various appendices that may be helpful in your work.

A traffic stop is valid if it is supported by reasonable suspicion. During a valid traffic stop, an officer may demand the driver’s license and registration, may run a computer check based on those documents, and so on. But what if the reasonable suspicion supporting the stop dissipates soon after the stop is made?

President Obama delivered the annual State of the Union address this week, and the Washington Post reports here that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seized the moment to take her annual State of the Union nap. Hopefully this news roundup will keep everyone awake!

My choice of topic for today’s post may or may not have been influenced by the fact that I’m growing a beard. Reviews are mixed, ranging from nonspecific acknowledgment (“You have a beard!”) to good-natured derision (“Did you lose a bet?”). Jeff says I’m a pair of skinny jeans away from becoming a hipster. Kidding aside, today’s post is about the serious subject of whether prison officials must permit an inmate to grow a beard in accordance with his sincere religious beliefs. The Supreme Court held this week in Holt v. Hobbs that they must.

DWI arrests in North Carolina’s capital city are on the rise. The Wake County district attorney’s office expects to prosecute around 7,000 DWI cases this fiscal year—2,000 more than it handled in 2013-14.  The increased arrests result from beefed up patrol activity made possible by federal grants. And there is some speculation that the decline in fatal alcohol-related accidents in Raleigh from the previous year may be related to the additional arrests. Yet people continue to drive while impaired in Raleigh and elsewhere in North Carolina, sometimes with tragic consequences. And every DWI charge adds a court case to an already crowded district court docket. I wonder: Can we prosecute away the risks posed by impaired drivers?

On Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced major new limits on asset forfeiture. In a nutshell, he put a stop to the federal civil forfeiture of assets seized by state and local law enforcement and “adopted” under the Equitable Sharing program. The details are a little fuzzy, but this may be a very big deal in the world of forfeiture, for reasons I discuss below.