North Carolina Criminal Law

(Author’s note:  The concluding paragraph of this post was amended after its publication to include the number of outstanding warrants and orders for arrest on July 1, 2016.) Every year, […]

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Last year, a panel of the Fourth Circuit decided United States v. Graham, 796 F.3d 332 (4th Cir. 2015). The panel ruled that “the government conducts a search under the […]

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In 2013, I wrote two posts on strip searches by law enforcement officers, which are available here and here. This post discusses the first published North Carolina appellate court strip […]

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Last week, the court of appeals decided State v. Perry. It’s the appellate division’s first foray into cell site location information and a case that raises questions about the status […]

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I’ve updated my paper on traffic stops to include Rodriguez v. United States, __ U.S. __, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), and other recent cases. It’s available here. For those not […]

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I’ve had the same question several times recently: can a magistrate issue a search warrant for a computer or a cell phone? The answer is yes. This post explains why […]

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About three months ago, the United States Supreme Court decided Rodriguez v. United States, __ U.S. __, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015). I wrote about it here. In a nutshell, […]

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Kathy Taft was bludgeoned and raped on March 5, 2010, as she lay in the bedroom of a friends’ home in Raleigh recovering from surgery.  She died four days later.  […]

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I’ve recently updated my paper on traffic stops. As before, it covers stops from start to finish, including the legal standard for making a stop, the length of a stop, […]

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In my first Warrantless Stops 101 post, I offered these basic questions to frame the analysis: Did a seizure occur? If so and it was a stop, was it supported […]

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