North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

In a post last week, I mentioned that it looks increasingly likely that Supreme Court will grant certiorari in a case considering cell phone searches. In this post, I’ll support […]

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This blog post is divided in two parts. This is Part II. Part I was posted yesterday. That post offered a general introduction, defined a strip search, and discussed the […]

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This blog post is divided in two parts. This is Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow. Introduction. These posts will discuss strip searches by law enforcement officers that […]

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The line between a consensual encounter and a seizure can be blurry. Generally, there is no seizure when an officer simply approaches a person and asks the person a question. […]

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Maybe so, according to a recent Reuters report. Apparently, the Special Operations Division of the DEA receives information from the NSA and passes it to DEA field agents. The agents […]

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I wrote here about how law enforcement officers may obtain historical information about the location of a suspect’s cellular phone. There have been several developments in the law since then, […]

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Law enforcement use of automated license plate readers has become very widespread. It raises several interesting legal and practical issues which I briefly explore below. What are they? License plate […]

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The question. Many cases hold that the smell of marijuana provides probable cause to search a vehicle. See, e.g., State v. Greenwood, 301 N.C. 705, 708 (1981); State v. Smith, […]

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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 […]

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The United States Supreme Court decided Missouri v McNeely yesterday, holding that in impaired driving investigations, the natural dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in […]

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