The United States Supreme Court recently decided Porter v. McCollum, a capital case in which the defendant claimed that his lawyer performed ineffectively at the penalty phase of his trial. […]
Update: Check out this post about a recent court of appeals case in this area. Original post: Most DWI cases involve breath tests for alcohol. But there are circumstances in […]
A recent court of appeals case, Blaylock v. N.C. Department of Correction-Division of Community Corrections, has spurred to write about something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while: […]
Editor’s note: Tom Tynan is an alumnus of Duke University Law School, a recent federal judicial clerk, and a soon-to-be associate at a large law firm. He spent several months […]
I have been asked several times about the validity of search warrants that authorize the police to search a particular place and “all persons on the premises.” It sounds as […]
There’s been quite a bit of criminal law news this past week: 1. The controversy over the Bowden case and its interpretation of life sentences continues. Governor Perdue has a […]
A while ago, Alyson Grine and I wrote a post about consecutive sentences for misdemeanors. In it, we discussed the rule that when a court elects to impose consecutive sentences […]
Editor’s note: This post has been revised slightly in response to a helpful comment from a reader. A district court session usually lasts one day, so many court actors have […]
We’ve seen several significant cases concerning gun laws in the past few years. The two biggest, of course, are District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. ___ (2008), in which […]
The court of appeals issued a batch of opinions yesterday. Among them is State v. Washburn, a drug dog case. An extremely compressed summary of Washburn is that an informant […]