North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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 err when it instructed the jury on a theory that was not alleged in the indictment. I’m returning to Tate this week to discuss another aspect of the Court’s holding, namely its determination that the defendant’s confrontation clause rights were not violated when an expert from the State Crime Lab testified to an opinion that was based in part on DNA test results generated by private third-party laboratory. This post will unpack the court’s analysis of that issue and will consider what it might mean for testimony by substitute analysts more generally.

What do the topics in the title of this blog post have in common? They were the focus of the students’ criminal justice presentations this week. Nine teams of students, two on each team, have been researching and preparing their presentations throughout the semester. Here are some of my takeaways from the first set of presentations.

The State of North Carolina goes to trial against Donnie Defendant, who is alleged to be the infamous “Tarheel State Killer” and charged with committing a series of brutal assaults and murders several decades ago. The state’s case depends heavily on matching DNA evidence from the crime scene to a sample of DNA taken off a cigarette butt discarded by Donnie. At trial, Special Agent Wanda Witness testifies as an expert in forensic DNA analysis for the state. After explaining the science behind PCR, STR, loci, and markers, Wanda opines that Donnie’s DNA is indeed a match to the DNA recovered from the crime scene.

Sounds like good news for the state, but what exactly does a “match” mean? And how may the significance or statistical probability of that “match” be expressed to the jury? It’s an important question, because what might sound like two similar ways of expressing the same probability can have dramatically different meanings – and possibly even be considered error on appeal.

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided a case that one Justice called “perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this Court has heard in decades.” A bare majority of the […]

In recent years there has been a spate of cases assessing the sufficiency of the evidence in murder prosecutions where the State’s case is built on circumstantial evidence. A recent […]

As most readers of this blog are aware, S.L. 2010-94 creates a new statute, G.S. 15A-266.3A, which provides for the collection of a DNA sample from anyone arrested for a […]

The News and Observer reports today on “a proposal to collect DNA from suspects when they are arrested for felonies or violent crimes.” The bill in question is H1403, and […]

It’s time to round up some news. First, the News and Observer recently commented on President Obama’s failure to nominate any additional North Carolinians for the Fourth Circuit — a […]

Several interesting news items have cropped up recently. First, the United States Supreme Court decided District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, in which a 5-4 majority ruled that there is no […]

Editor’s note: A previous post concerning a United States Supreme Court case about post-conviction DNA testing appears here. Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of calls about requests for post-conviction […]