A UNC School of Government Blog
Last week, I wrote about the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ holding in State v. Smith, ___ N.C. App. ___, 729 S.E.2d 120 (2012), that a drug dog’s positive alert to a motor vehicle in which no drugs were found did not, by itself, provide probable cause to search the person of a recent passenger … Read more
The Justice Reinvestment Act created a new early release program called Advanced Supervised Release (ASR). In short, the law allows certain prison inmates to get out of prison early if they complete “risk reduction incentives” while they are incarcerated. I wrote about the basics of the law here, and covered a glitch in the law’s … Read more
Fall is here, meaning cooler weather, leaves changing colors, and of course, elections. The North Carolina Bar Association has a new website that provides the results of performance surveys regarding incumbent trial court judges and their challengers. There are also elections for several seats on the court of appeals, and one on the state supreme … Read more
Last August, the court of appeals in State v. Smith, ___ N.C. App. ___, 729 S.E.2d 120, temp. stay granted, __ N.C. __, 731 S.E.2d 179 (mem.) (2012), decided an issue of first-impression related to a drug dog alert and the reasonableness of an ensuing Fourth Amendment search. Since we haven’t yet blogged about Smith, … Read more
A couple of months ago, I blogged about State v. Herman, __ N.C. App. __ (2012), a case in which the court of appeals found a fatal defect in an indictment charging the defendant with being a sex offender unlawfully on a premises in violation of G.S. 14-208.18(a)(2). In a nutshell, the indictment in that … Read more
Under the Justice Reinvestment Act, a probation officer may, through delegated authority, impose a short period of jail confinement in response to a violation of a court-imposed probation condition. The officer may impose up to six days of confinement per month during any three separate months of a period of probation. The time must be … Read more
It’s the first Monday in October, which means that the Supreme Court gets back to business after its summer recess. Among the criminal cases the Court will consider this Term are the following: Missouri v. McNeely. As noted in Friday’s News Roundup, this case asks “[w]hether a law enforcement officer may obtain a nonconsensual and … Read more
I wrote earlier this week about James Ladd, the murderer who recently escaped from a North Carolina prison. Well, he’s been caught, apparently without much fuss: a motorist saw a man running from some woods towards a house and called the authorities, who went to the house and found Ladd crouched in the garage. In … Read more
An Egyptian-American activist/columnist/media personality named Mona Eltahawy was recently arrested in New York while defacing a pro-Israel subway advertisement. The entire incident was captured on video and can be seen here. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Orin Kerr focuses on Ms. Eltahawy’s demand that the arresting officer tell her what she was being arrested … Read more
A murderer recently escaped from a North Carolina prison. According to this News and Observer story, the escapee is James Ladd, who was convicted in 1981 of two counts of murder and one count of armed robbery. Mr. Ladd escaped from the minimum-security Tillery Correctional Center in Halifax County on Sunday. He was serving three … Read more