A UNC School of Government Blog
Several interesting stories have cropped up over the past week. 1. In Moore County, a woman who was convicted in district court of DWI and speeding was acquitted on trial de novo in Superior Court. The unusual aspect of the case is that she admitted both offenses, but asserted the defense of necessity. According to … Read more
March Madness starts today. Apparently, many people take the time to predict how the entire tournament will play out, in an age-old custom called “filling out a bracket.” How strange! (Printable PDF here.) Anyhow, I’m told that some of these people will band together with others to form “pools,” to which each participant contributes money. … Read more
In an earlier post, I wrote about relevancy and guilt of another. In this post, I consider another relevancy issue: context, circumstances, and chain of events evidence. Consider this problem: At the defendant’s murder trial, the State seeks to admit evidence that the defendant was doing drugs before the murder. To keep the facts clean, … Read more
I did a little research yesterday morning about running from the police. It started when, in connection with a presentation for which I was preparing, I reviewed State v. Mewborn, __ N.C. App. __, 684 S.E.2d 535 (2009). Mewborn arose in Kinston. Officers were “patrolling a high crime neighborhood” and specifically, were “approaching and questioning … Read more
Every state and the District of Columbia prohibits driving with an alcohol concentration of 0.08 or more though state laws vary regarding whether to establish a violation of the per se impaired driving law an alcohol concentration of .08 or more must exist at the time of driving (see, for example, Ala Code § 32-5A-191; … Read more
Call me sentimental, but I kinda miss the days when ACC tournament Friday meant the working world nearly grinding to a halt. These days, it hardly skips a beat. The press of interesting criminal law news certainly hasn’t slowed down. Some recent stories of interest include: 1. The News and Observer reports that two former … Read more
A longstanding lament of the corrections community in North Carolina has been the lack of a residential substance abuse treatment center for female probationers and parolees. In other words, there is no DART-Cherry for women. (DART stands for Drug Alcohol Recovery Treatment.) DART-Cherry, for those who may not know, is a 300-bed facility in Goldsboro … Read more
I blogged recently about whether the state is obligated to produce its witnesses’ criminal records in discovery. (Recall that the answer is no, in North Carolina, with some exceptions.) Another question that sometimes comes up regarding the state’s witnesses is whether the state must inform the defense if one of its witnesses goes missing, or … Read more
In Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), the Supreme Court held that “the Eighth Amendment prohibits a State from carrying out a sentence of death upon a prisoner who is insane.” In other words, a defendant who was sane at the time of the crime, and competent at the time of his trial, but … Read more
Editor’s note: Jessie has prepared a series of posts about the law of relevancy. They’ll run as an intermittent series over the next several weeks. In this and upcoming posts, I will explore several relevancy issues that arise with some frequency. Perhaps the most litigated relevancy issue in North Carolina criminal cases is the admissibility … Read more