July 24, 2025
Special thanks to Sloan Godbey, Summer Law Fellow at UNC SOG, for their significant contributions to this post. In March of last year, I did a thorough review of North […]
April 24, 2025
A common evidence question that arises is how to properly authenticate digital communications. We have written on the topic in several blogs: How Can a Party Show Authorship of a […]
March 25, 2024
Video evidence authentication has received a fair amount of treatment on this blog. The topic remains an area of practical significance given the prevalence of video evidence in criminal trials […]
May 1, 2023
In my last post, I wrote about how a party might authenticate a Facebook direct message or other text-based electronic communication. That post focused on how the proponent of the […]
April 17, 2023
Suppose that a defendant is charged with possessing fentanyl with the intent to sell it. The state’s evidence includes a Facebook direct message, purportedly from the defendant to an informant, […]
December 8, 2020
Nearly half of the 7.7 billion people in the world are on social media, and each of those users has an average of 8 different accounts. The rate is even […]
March 12, 2020
My colleagues and predecessors here at the School of Government have written about video evidence many times over the years, summarizing the basic rules and significant cases in posts available […]
October 11, 2017
After Roshawn Thompson picked up his cousin Kendall Rascoe from the Greenville mall in November 2014, Thompson and a friend, Andre Grey, robbed Rascoe at gunpoint. At Thompson’s armed robbery […]
June 27, 2016
Technologists tell us that we are in the age of ubiquitous video. It seems that almost everything is being recorded. Naturally, this means that more and more video recordings are […]
April 18, 2016
The Supreme Court of North Carolina just decided State v. Snead, a case about the authentication of surveillance video. The court adopted a more relaxed approach to authentication than the […]