Drug Dogs
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 […]
Another Batch of Satellite-Based Monitoring Cases
The last round of opinions from the court of appeals included three related to satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. None of them broke any major new ground, but two […]
Using Other Bad Acts to Prove Malice in a Vehicular Homicide Case
Among the most recent batch of opinions issued by the Court of Appeals was State v. Tellez, in which the court upheld the defendant’s conviction of two counts of second-degree […]
Blog Outage!
You may have noticed that the blog — along with the rest of the School of Government’s website — was down most of the day Friday. I was unable to […]
Defense Access to Stored Electronic Communications
As I mentioned last week, I have a new publication entitled Prosecution and Law Enforcement Access to Information about Electronic Communications. It’s meant to be useful on a range of […]
News Roundup
First off, it’s Veterans’ Day. Thanks to all who have served — including Jamie Markham, who regularly contributes to this blog — and Godspeed to those who are in harm’s […]
Mello and “Loitering for Drugs” Ordinances
Can a municipality adopt an ordinance that criminalizes loitering for the purpose of drug activity? I’ve been asked that question several times, and in fact, a number of North Carolina […]
The New Felony Sentencing Grid
For the first time since 1995 we have a new felony punishment chart for Structured Sentencing. Two pieces of legislation from the past session, S.L. 2009-555 and S.L. 2009-556, made […]
New Publication on Electronic Search and Seizure
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m especially interested in the law regarding electronic communications and electronic evidence. (For one thing, it allows me to look at web sites like Gizmodo and […]
Sentencing in Impaired Driving Cases
I first encountered North Carolina’s impaired driving sentencing scheme several years ago when I worked as an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of North Carolina. I represented […]