North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

It is the time of the year when the School of Government criminal law faculty begin to gear up for case updates. To prepare — and to pitch in on […]

Near the end of last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court decided State v. Taylor, 2021-NCSC-164, 866 S.E.2d 740 (2021), and we summarized the opinion here. This post considers the potential impact of Taylor on other offenses involving threatening speech, and addresses a couple lingering questions that may arise in future cases.

My colleagues and I usually spend the waning weeks of May slogging through months of appellate opinions, determining which cases merit discussion at upcoming summer conferences. This year, of course, […]

This post summarizes opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on November 19, 2019. Trial court did not err in denying defendant’s motion to suppress evidence obtained […]

An experienced attorney from another state recently remarked on her surprise at learning that there was no statute of limitations barring the prosecution of felony offenses in North Carolina after the passage of a specified period of time. This attorney’s comment reminded me that while the no-statute-of-limitations-state-of-affairs may be well-known among experienced practitioners of criminal law in NC, it isn’t necessarily known by others. 

Shortly after I published last week’s post on State v. Babich, an astute reader asked about the court’s harmless error analysis. How, he inquired, could the improper admission of expert testimony that the defendant had an alcohol concentration of 0.08 be harmless error? Did the jury’s verdict indicate that it found the defendant guilty only under the “under the influence” prong of impairment rather than under the “alcohol concentration of 0.08 or more” prong? To answer these questions, I had to dig into the record on appeal and provide a bit of background on the requirement for jury unanimity in DWI cases. I thought others might be interested in my response.