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In a post last week, I mentioned that it looks increasingly likely that Supreme Court will grant certiorari in a case considering cell phone searches. In this post, I’ll support […]
There was a ton of interesting news this week, starting in Union County, where the “district attorney has dismissed cases against 39 people because Monroe police officers failed to provide […]
A defense lawyer from another state recently asked me if it was possible to get probation for involuntary manslaughter in North Carolina. It is apparently possible but uncommon in his […]
Tucked into the 2013 North Carolina budget bill is a provision imposing new court costs for expert witnesses who testify about chemical or forensic analyses at trial. Specifically, the new […]
The Ninth Circuit recently decided a case that addresses a question I’ve been asked several times: may the police answer a seized cell phone? The answer may depend on the […]
Is it reasonable to believe that the car an impaired driver is operating contains evidence of the DWI? That’s the question law enforcement officers must answer in a post-Gant world […]
There’s a pretty strong argument that the state court system is underfunded. And there’s a pretty strong argument that the federal court system is underfunded. The Judicial Conference of the […]
In State v. Cooper, issued last week, the Court of Appeals reversed the defendant’s conviction for first-degree murder of his wife and ordered a new trial. The case has drawn […]
Trial lawyers love a good gotcha moment and this method of impeachment–by prior inconsistent statement–presents lots of opportunities for that. Proving that a witness previously made statements inconsistent with his […]
Special probation, commonly referred to as a split sentence, is a powerful sentencing tool. It allows the judge to impose a mix of imprisonment and probation that can achieve multiple […]