North Carolina Criminal Law

My colleague Joe Hyde blogged last week about the Court of Appeals’ determination in State v. Tate, __ N.C. App. ___ (June 18, 2025), that the trial court did not […]

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The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limits the use of testimonial hearsay statements by an unavailable witness at a criminal trial, as does its state […]

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As regular readers know, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Smith v. Arizona, 602 U.S. 779 (2024), this past June. The decision undercut the reasoning used by North Carolina courts to […]

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I recently gave a criminal law case update to a group of judges.  I had quite a few cases that I planned to cover in relatively short order. I started […]

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My colleagues have covered the retroactivity rules many times before on the blog but the analysis for determining the retroactivity of new federal rules has changed in the last few […]

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This post summarizes Smith v. Arizona and United States v. Rahimi from the Supreme Court of the United States, decided on June 21, 2024. These summaries, prepared by Phil Dixon (Smith) and […]

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My colleague, Phil Dixon, blogged about the Court of Appeals’ decision in State v. Joyner, 284 N.C. App. 681 (2022), here. In Joyner, the court ruled that the State did […]

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I mentioned in a recent News Roundup that the U.S. Supreme Court granted review in Smith v. Arizona. The case tees up a question that has been lingering since at […]

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the foundational requirements for introducing a defendant’s medical records in a DWI trial. Soon after I posted, a reader asked whether introducing those records […]

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The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment generally guarantees a criminal defendant the right to confront and cross-examine his accusers in person. If a witness was available for an earlier […]

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