A UNC School of Government Blog
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 Court ruled that the police may take DNA from those arrested for, but not yet convicted of, “serious offense[s].” The case resolves a deep split … Read more
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 every case sufficient to justify conducting a blood test without a warrant. The high court thus resolved the split among state courts regarding whether its … Read more
Today, most Supreme Court watchers are focused on the oral argument in the same-sex marriage cases. But the Court also released an important opinion in Florida v. Jardines, ruling that an officer conducts a Fourth Amendment search when he brings a drug dog onto the porch of a house to sniff the front door. Jardines … Read more
In Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692 (1981), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an officer’s authority under the Fourth Amendment to detain—without reasonable suspicion or probable cause—people at a residence where a search warrant is being executed. The defendant in Summers was detained on a walkway leading down from the front steps of a house … Read more
I’m eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Missouri v. McNeely. I want to know whether the exigency created by the dissipation of alcohol in the body, without more, permits the police to compel the withdrawal of blood from an impaired driving suspect without a warrant. But there’s one thing I already know: The legal … 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
May an officer prolong a routine traffic stop for four and a half minutes to allow a drug dog to sniff the exterior of the vehicle–even if the officer lacks reasonable suspicion to believe that drugs are in the car? Yes she may. The court of appeals held this week in State v. Sellars, No. … Read more
I’m just getting back to work after a leave of absence, and I’m still getting caught up on some major cases that were decided while I was out. One such case is Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, __ U.S. __, 132 S. Ct. 1510 (2012), the jail strip search case recently decided by the … Read more
A recent en banc decision from the Supreme Court of Missouri adds to the growing divide among state appellate courts regarding whether the exigency created by the dissipation of blood-alcohol levels is sufficient, by itself, to render a nonconsensual, warrantless blood draw from a person arrested for impaired driving a reasonable search and seizure under … Read more
Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court decided United States v. Jones, the important GPS tracking case I previously blogged about here. (The case was captioned United States v. Maynard at that time.) In brief, Washington, DC officers suspected that the defendant was a drug dealer. They wanted to track his movements, so they obtained a … Read more