North Carolina Criminal Law

As I noted in a previous post, it is a crime under G.S. 14-454(b) “willfully and without authorization . . .  [to] access[] . . . any computer.” I posed […]

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Jamie recently blogged here about ad hoc conditions of probation, i.e., conditions other than the statutory ones. Because I’m interested in criminal law and technology, I wanted to add a […]

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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 […]

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When a person over 16, using a computer or other electronic device, and with the “intent to commit an unlawful sex act, entices, advises, coerces, orders, or commands” a person […]

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What does it mean to access a computer without authorization? It’s an important question. North Carolina’s computer crime statutes appear at G.S. 14-453 et seq. Among other things, the statutes […]

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When a law enforcement officer is entitled to search a computer for evidence, she typically is entitled to look at every file on the computer, at least briefly. That’s because […]

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Computers and electronic storage media can hold massive quantities of data. At approximately 30,000 pages per gigabyte, a low-end laptop computer with a 250 gigabyte hard drive can store the […]

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The Ninth Circuit recently decided United States v. Payton, a computer search case that quietly adopts some pretty radical ideas. Based on the lack of comments on my previous computer […]

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I’m getting ready to teach a session at the Superior Court Judges’ Conference about searches of computers and other electronic devices, so I’ve been reading all the computer search cases […]

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Most readers of this blog know (1) that a search done pursuant to consent doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment, but (2) that the scope of search is limited by the […]

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