August 29, 2016
About a year ago, I wrote about State v. Hembree, 368 N.C. 2 (2015), a case in which the state supreme court reversed a murder conviction based on the State’s excessive use of Rule 404(b) evidence. This month, a divided court of appeals decided a case in the same vein. The case is State v. Reed.
March 7, 2016
The court of appeals recently decided State v. Ford, a case about the authentication of social media evidence. This is the first North Carolina appellate case to give careful consideration to the issue, and the opinion sets a relatively low bar for authentication. Because this type of evidence is increasingly prevalent, the case is an important one.
June 1, 2015
The state supreme court recently reversed a death sentence and a first-degree murder conviction because the State presented “an excessive amount” of otherwise admissible Rule 404(b) evidence. How much is too much?
December 2, 2014
One of my all-time favorite emails was received from a prosecutor who was handling a drug trafficking case. The email included a picture, plucked from what purported to be the defendant’s Facebook page, showing the defendant sitting on a pile of cash (later determined to be $1.6 million!), holding an AK-47. Jeff has written (here) about authenticating photographs from social media sites. But what of the other evidence that is mined from social media—how is that authenticated? A recent Second Circuit case adheres to the line that the relevant standard isn’t particularly high but finds that the prosecution didn’t meet it in this case.
September 23, 2014
In some states, theft of an automobile is a felony regardless of the value of the vehicle. See, e.g., Fla. Stat. § 812.014. Not so in North Carolina. Motor vehicles […]
September 15, 2014
During the second phase of a capital trial, the jury must decide whether to sentence the defendant to death or to life in prison. The jury’s perception of prison life […]
June 2, 2014
I’ve had more and more questions about introducing GPS tracking data in criminal trials. When I think about digital evidence, I think about authentication as the first hurdle. This post […]
May 19, 2014
Suppose that the defendant is charged with a gang-related murder. The State seeks to establish that the defendant is a gang member by introducing a photograph that a detective found […]
March 24, 2014
In this, my last post in a long series on hearsay exceptions, I’ll address the Rule 804 exception for statements against penal interest. Rule 804(b)(3) creates a hearsay exception for […]
March 17, 2014
Rule 804 contains five hearsay exceptions that apply when the declarant is unavailable. I addressed one of them—the residual exception—in a prior post. Another one of the five—statements of family […]