A UNC School of Government Blog
The hottest topic of the week — aside from the gripping Duke/UNC basketball game on Wednesday night — was certainly the hearing in Forsyth County about the constitutionality of the Racial Justice Act, G.S. 15A-2010 et seq. According to this News and Observer report, the state argued that the Act is “too sweeping to apply … Read more
In my first post on this topic, I set the stage for a discussion about the constitutionality of remote two-way testimony. In my second post, I explored the legal authority on that issue. In this final post, I will introduce two procedures might allow the State to achieve some of the benefits of remote testimony, … Read more
In my last post, I set the stage for a discussion about the constitutionality of remote two-way testimony. In this post I will explore the authority bearing on that question. Guidance from the United States Supreme Court The question whether remote two-way testimony satisfies the confrontation clause has not been resolved in a … Read more
Since the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), interest has been growing in the use of remote testimony as a method to satisfy the confrontation clause. Crawford held that under the sixth amendment’s confrontation clause, testimonial statements by witnesses who do not appear at trial cannot be admitted … Read more
I’m preparing to teach a session during which I’ll cover the use of Rule 404(b) evidence in sexual assault cases. (As most readers of this blog know, Rule 404(b) evidence is evidence of bad acts by the defendant other than the charged offense; such evidence isn’t supposed to be used to show that the defendant … Read more
Several stories appeared this week that may be of interest: 1. The News and Observer ran this article, headlined “Lawyers Take on Net Predator Law,” about defense attorneys’ efforts to challenge G.S. 14-202.5. The statute makes it a felony for a sex offender to “access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender … Read more
North Carolina’s prisons are crowded now, but they were really crowded in the early 1990s. To keep the system functioning, the state ramped up the rules for sentence reduction credit and parole eligibility considerably—to an extent that the average felon was serving less than 20 percent of his or her actual sentence. For some offenders … Read more
Part I of this post left for another day consideration of whether a defendant who does not speak English may be deemed to have willfully refused a chemical analysis when notice of the implied consent rights is provided only in English and whether providing notice only in English may violate such a defendant’s constitutional rights. … Read more
Several earlier posts a (here, here, and here) address the requirement that a person arrested for an implied consent offense be informed of statutory implied consent rights before being asked to submit to a chemical analysis. Posts (here and here) address the remedy for failure to adhere to these statutory requirements. None of those posts, … Read more
I recently received an email that began “I have been reading in the news that Sheriff Mike Cain of Yadkin County pled guilty to eight misdemeanors. I am curious how the Superior Court had jurisdiction [since the case was not an appeal, but rather one of original jurisdiction].” The author suggested that the answer might … Read more