North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

I recently participated in a WFAE radio show about law enforcement use of drones, along with a captain from the Winston-Salem Police Department and an advocate from the ACLU. I thought the discussion was excellent, with a nice balance of perspectives. In the course of preparing for the program, I did an environmental scan about how law enforcement officers are currently using drones, and looked for court opinions about some of the legal questions presented by drone use. This post summarizes what I learned before and during the show.

In February, I blogged about State v. Thomas, 295 N.C. App. 564 (2024), and whether law enforcement can review ankle-monitoring data without a warrant. The defendant in Thomas was on post-release supervision when officers pulled his location data, and the Court of Appeals upheld the warrantless retrieval of the data. However, questions remain about whether a warrant is necessary when a supervisee is on probation or pretrial release. Although North Carolina appellate courts have not directly addressed these questions, courts outside the state have in recent years. This post examines some of the cases.

Last September, the Court of Appeals decided State v. Thomas, No. COA23-210, __ N.C. App. __ (2024), a case involving law enforcement’s retrieval of ankle monitor location data gathered while the defendant was on post-release supervision.

This is the first North Carolina appellate case to address whether it is constitutional for law enforcement to retrieve ankle monitor data without a warrant. This post will discuss the reasoning in Thomas and its implications for related questions.

Five years ago, I wrote about geofence warrants. I said then that “there are zero cases on Westlaw . . . [and] virtually no secondary source material about these warrants.” Times have changed. Now we have cases, including one from the Fourth Circuit, and lots of secondary source material. This post explains the state of the law on geofence warrants.

Earlier this year, the Fourth Circuit decided United States v. Zelaya-Veliz, 94 F.4th 321 (4^th Cir. 2024). Phil summarized it here when it came out, but we thought it merited its own post because of its extended discussion of how the Fourth Amendment applies to search warrants for social media account information. The court’s discussion of the need for temporal limitations in such warrants is especially noteworthy, as is the court’s analysis of the scope of the information seized pursuant to the warrants approved by the court. We’ll start with a recap of the case, and then end with some thoughts for law enforcement and prosecutors, and for defenders.

Once upon a time, search warrants were simple. An officer would obtain a warrant to search a suspect’s home or some other physical location connected to a crime. The officer would go to the location, announce his or her presence, and conduct the search. But these days, officers frequently want to obtain records and other evidence from businesses not suspected of any wrongdoing. For example, they want bank records that can be used to trace the suspect’s ill-gotten gains. They want cell site location information that can be used to tie the suspect to the crime scene. And they want email records that show communication between the suspect and his or her coconspirators. Officers do not typically kick down these businesses’ doors and start rummaging around, partly because that would be needlessly disruptive and partly because officers might have a hard time locating evidence stored in the cloud or on a server located who-knows-where. Instead, officers obtain a search warrant, then send a copy of the warrant to the company in question and ask the company to search its own records and provide responsive materials. Is that OK?

In preparation for some upcoming teaching, I’ve been brushing up on anticipatory search warrants. Such warrants authorize a search, but only once a “triggering condition” takes place. The most common scenario involves the controlled delivery of drugs that have been intercepted in transit. The warrant authorizes the search of the destination residence, but only once the drugs have been delivered. Case law establishes that a warrant may issue only if the drugs are on a “sure course” towards delivery. This post asks why – and whether – that should be the case.

Suppose a superior court judge issues a search warrant authorizing the search of a suspect’s house for drugs. Officers execute the warrant, find drugs, seize them, and charge the suspect with drug offenses. The charges end up in superior court, where the suspect – now the defendant – moves to suppress, arguing that the search warrant application lacked probable cause and that the judge who issued the warrant erred in doing so. Is it OK for the judge who issued the warrant to hear such a motion?

I recently finished a paper on the law and practice of no-knock warrants in North Carolina. I went with the creative title, The Law and Practice of No-Knock Search Warrants in […]

Last week, the FBI searched former President Trump’s home at the Mar-a-Lago Club pursuant to a search warrant. At first none of the relevant documents were publicly available. The application, the warrant itself, and the inventory were all sealed. The Government, with the consent of former President Trump, later moved to unseal the warrant and the inventory. That motion was granted and anyone can access the now-public documents here. The application remains under seal, though members of the news media have moved to unseal it. Because several people asked me about public access to federal search warrants and related documents, and because the process isn’t exactly the same as it is under state law, I thought I’d do a post comparing state and federal law on this issue.