A UNC School of Government Blog
Jeff is away from the office today so he entrusted me with the keys to the blog. I briefly considered filling this post with a series of hilarious 6-second Vines of my kids, but ultimately decided to stick with the traditional roundup of the week’s criminal law news. (What’s a Vine? See here. Or just … Read more
As Jessie noted in a previous post, when a prosecutor is making his or her closing argument, “caution should be exercised with regard to all comparisons between the defendant and an animal.” But what if the defendant is an animal? A South Carolina judge recently appointed an attorney to represent a pit bull alleged to … Read more
Last week, I wrote about the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ holding in State v. Smith, ___ N.C. App. ___, 729 S.E.2d 120 (2012), that a drug dog’s positive alert to a motor vehicle in which no drugs were found did not, by itself, provide probable cause to search the person of a recent passenger … Read more
This recent post by Professor Orin Kerr reports on an emerging split of authority on what the state needs to show about the training and experience of a drug-sniffing dog before a dog’s alert will provide probable cause – to search a car, for example, or to support the issuance of a search warrant for … Read more
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 told the police that the defendant was a drug dealer and kept drugs at his house and at a storage unit. Based on the tip, … Read more