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The General Assembly is gearing up for the long session, and the AOC has a new lobbyist: former Rep. Tom Murry of Morrisville will be the AOC’s “chief legal counsel for governmental affairs,” according to this News and Observer story. Murry is a Republican and an attorney, and his main priority likely will be securing more resources for the courts.
In the course of robbing a convenience store, a man restrains a 17-year-old clerk. Suppose the parties work out a plea to second-degree kidnapping. Everything is fine until the judge advises the defendant of the maximum permissible punishment for his Class E crime: 136 months. “136 months?” his lawyer said, puzzled. “I thought it would be 88.” “It would be,” the court replied, “if this crime didn’t require registration as a sex offender.”
Myra Lynne Combs beat her DWI charges in court. The trial court held that the officer who stopped her didn’t have a lawful reason to do so. So the trial court suppressed all the evidence resulting from the stop, and the State dismissed the charges. But Combs’ license was revoked for a year anyway based on her refusal to submit to a breath test after she was arrested. Combs didn’t think that was right, so she took her case to the state court of appeals.
Recently a caller asked: Does the fact that the defendant was found in possession of goods five days after they were stolen create an inference that he stole them? The answer: It depends.
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?