A UNC School of Government Blog
There’s been lots of interesting news lately, so I’ll dive right in. 1. The state supreme court issued several opinions yesterday. By far the most significant criminal case is State v. Ward. I may do a whole post about Ward, but the basic holding is that visual identification of controlled substances is unreliable and that … Read more
The court of appeals recently decided State v. Dark. It’s a concise opinion that summarizes and applies the black-letter law on an issue that comes up regularly: when must the state disclose the identity of a confidential informant to the defendant? G.S. 15A-904(a1) says that “[t]he State is not required to disclose the identity of … Read more
In several prior posts (including this one) I provided a link to the Department of Correction’s administrative regulation on sentence reduction credits. I’ve written about the credits applicable in impaired driving cases, and just last week I wrote about a Supreme Court case on good time credit in the federal prison system. It occurs to … Read more
As I have discussed in a number of prior posts [editor’s note: the most recent of those posts is here], the North Carolina courts have been struggling with whether the Confrontation Clause, as interpreted the Court in Crawford v. Washington and Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, allows for the use of substitute analysts. The petition for writ … Read more
There’s a recurrent discovery issue in child pornography cases. Generally, it goes like this: the defendant is arrested and charged with a child pornography offense. The prosecution contends that the defendant’s computer contains images of child pornography. The defendant retains a computer expert to examine his computer, hoping to show that the images were downloaded … Read more
The world’s biggest sporting event begins today in South Africa. I’ve been playing soccer more or less continuously — albeit not very well — for more than 30 years. Predictably, I’m pretty excited about the World Cup, especially the critical matchup tomorrow between the United States and England. But for today, I remain focused on … Read more
The Supreme Court issued its opinion in Barber v. Thomas on Monday, upholding the manner in which the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) calculates “good time credits” under 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b). That law says that a prisoner who is serving a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year can receive up to 54 … Read more
Rule 702(a1) was enacted in 2006 (effective for hearings held August 21, 2006 or later) to render admissible two types of expert testimony on the issue of impairment: (1) testimony regarding the results of a Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN) test; and (2) testimony from a certified Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) regarding whether a person is … Read more
Last week, I posted about the second look doctrine. (You can read that post here.) Recall that the basic idea is that if the police have custody of an object — like a wallet, or a purse, or a cell phone — that they could have searched incident to a defendant’s arrest and booking, they … Read more
I may be the only person in America who has never seen an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Nonetheless, I am interested in the so-called CSI effect. As The Economist explains in this succinct article, jurors who have been exposed to television crime dramas may have unrealistic expectations about the ability of forensic science … Read more