North Carolina Criminal Law

I have previously written about how the State may obtain the medical records of a person suspected of or charged with impaired driving. This post focuses on the requirements for […]

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Love them or hate them, it looks like “emojis” are here to stay. As of this writing, more than 3,000 emojis have been officially recognized, standardized, and named by the […]

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A few weeks ago I participated in a seminar on digital evidence, and one of the topics we discussed was cell phone records (subscriber information, call detail records, historical location […]

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I wrote a post (here) about the recorded recollection exception to the hearsay rule, in which I noted that this exception often is confused with the technique of present recollection […]

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Suppose that a law enforcement officer testifies for the State in a criminal case and is unable to remember some aspects of his investigation. The prosecutor shows the officer his […]

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I previously wrote (here) about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent cert grant in Ohio v. Clark, a case in which the Court will decide whether a three-year-old child’s statements to […]

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A recent case from the Supreme Court of North Carolina appears to have relaxed the limits on the use of hearsay at a probation violation hearing. The case also sheds […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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In earlier posts I covered the major Rule 803 hearsay exceptions, for which unavailability is immaterial. Rule 804 contains additional hearsay exceptions, but they only apply when the declarant is […]

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