North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

The North Carolina Supreme Court held in State v. Julius, 385 N.C. 331 (2023) (Julius I), that an officer’s warrantless search of a vehicle trapped in a ditch and partially […]

Fourth Amendment rights are enforced primarily through the exclusionary rule, which provides that evidence derived from an unconstitutional search or seizure is generally inadmissible at trial. Under the good faith exception, however, evidence will not be suppressed when the investigating officer reasonably relied upon prior judicial authorization for the search, such as a subsequently invalidated search warrant. Until recently, under State v. Carter, 322 N.C. 709 (1988), the general warrants clause of the state constitution (Art. 1, § 20) also yielded an exclusionary rule but without any good faith exception. In State v. Rogers, No. 377PS22 (N.C. Oct. 17, 2025), the North Carolina Supreme Court explicitly overruled Carter, concluding that there is a good faith exception to any exclusionary rule arising from the state constitution. This post considers the opinion in Rogers.

This post summarizes the published criminal opinions released by the Supreme Court of North Carolina on October 17, 2025.

Conventional wisdom says that unlike the federal court system, we do not have a good faith exception under North Carolina law. Even though G.S. 15A-974 was amended in 2011 and now expressly provides for a statutory good faith exception, most practitioners agree that its use remains off limits under our state constitution unless and until State v. Carter is overruled.

If you had asked me a month ago, I would have confidently said “yep, that’s the law.” Today, I’m a little less sure. Two recent Court of Appeals decisions have renewed the question of whether Carter actually says what we think it does.

The Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. California that cell phones can’t be searched incident to arrest. Jessie explained in yesterday’s post that Riley applies to cases that were pending […]