North Carolina Criminal Law

When may rap lyrics written by a defendant be admitted as evidence of guilt? That question has been in the news quite a bit lately as a result of a […]

Read post

I wrote here about the court of appeals’ recent ruling in State v. Davis that expert testimony calculating the defendant’s alcohol concentration based on odor alone was improperly admitted at […]

Read post

I’ve had a couple of questions about the same topic recently, so I thought I’d do a quick blog post about it. Our appellate courts have made clear that normally, […]

Read post

As readers of this blog know, Rule 404(b) provides that although evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts is not admissible to prove propensity, it may be admissible for other […]

Read post

The State’s effort to introduce photographs of a homicide victim into evidence often is met with defense objections. One objection sometimes asserted is that the photographs are inadmissible as substantive […]

Read post

Some crimes, such as felon in possession of a firearm, include as an element that the defendant has a qualifying prior conviction. When this is the case, the defense may […]

Read post

Recently, I’ve been posting about relevancy issues that arise with some frequency in North Carolina criminal cases. A final topic in that vein is the relevancy of evidence pertaining to […]

Read post

In an earlier post, I wrote about relevancy and guilt of another. In this post, I consider another relevancy issue: context, circumstances, and chain of events evidence. Consider this problem: […]

Read post

Editor’s note: Jessie has prepared a series of posts about the law of relevancy. They’ll run as an intermittent series over the next several weeks. In this and upcoming posts, […]

Read post