A UNC School of Government Blog
Update: Check out this post about a recent court of appeals case in this area. Original post: Most DWI cases involve breath tests for alcohol. But there are circumstances in which blood tests are administered. Most often, this happens when the defendant is injured in an accident and so cannot take a breath test. It … Read more
I have been asked several times about the validity of search warrants that authorize the police to search a particular place and “all persons on the premises.” It sounds as though such warrants are most often requested in drug cases. A number of courts across the country have ruled on the validity of these “all … Read more
by School of Government faculty member Michael Crowell In the last couple of years North Carolina has seen several high profile cases in which the sealing of a search warrant became an issue. One was the investigation of the murder of Nancy Cooper in Cary, and it led to last week’s North Carolina Court of … Read more
Computers and electronic storage media can hold massive quantities of data. At approximately 30,000 pages per gigabyte, a low-end laptop computer with a 250 gigabyte hard drive can store the equivalent of more than 7 million pages of paper. That’s thousands of bankers’ boxes worth, or as many pages as you’d find at a branch … Read more
The Ninth Circuit recently decided United States v. Payton, a computer search case that quietly adopts some pretty radical ideas. Based on the lack of comments on my previous computer search posts — here and here –most of you aren’t keenly interested in the application of the Fourth Amendment to emerging technologies, but Payton strikes … Read more
I’m getting ready to teach a session at the Superior Court Judges’ Conference about searches of computers and other electronic devices, so I’ve been reading all the computer search cases I can get my hands on. Recently, I stumbled on United States v. Crespo-Rios, __ F. Supp. 2d __, 2009 WL 1595463 (D. Puerto Rico … Read more