The NC Court of Appeals issued an opinion in State v. Scaturro (PDF) on Tuesday that clarified an important point relating to the obligations of an individual involved in a car crash pursuant to N.C.G.S. § 20-166. Scaturro was a case in which the defendant struck a boy on a bicycle with his vehicle, after the boy made a change of...
Continue ReadingI was a public defender in DC for a number of years before my family and I moved to North Carolina and I began practicing criminal law here in NC. I was tuned into what I believed were real, systemic problems in the criminal justice system in DC during my time there. Wildly disproportionate prosecution of minorities, judges with...
Continue ReadingA judge in Fairfax County, VA was arrested on a DUI charge and subsequently removed from presiding over DUI cases in the county. The scale of the hypocrisy that infects our entire judicial system is difficult to fathom until you see it up close, and realize that prosecutors routinely commit crimes for which they prosecute others (examples from 2017 alone:...
Continue ReadingIn Part I of this series, I looked at the inherent inaccuracies of the Intox EC/IR II Breathalyzer instrument even as it attempts to measure the alcohol concentration of a known control sample produced in a lab (TL;DR: it tolerates an inaccuracy range of at least .02, which is deeply problematic when that number is relied upon in threshold cases...
Continue ReadingOver 50,000 people in North Carolina were charged with Driving While Impaired (DWI) or a related offense in the fiscal year 2015/2016. Many of them were charged (and most later convicted) based largely on a reading from the Intox EC/IR II breathalyzer instrument manufactured by Intoximeters, Inc. In many of those cases, the BAC reading registered at or near...
Continue ReadingThe North Carolina Court of Appeals today in State v. Babich (PDF) ruled that the admission of expert testimony on “retrograde extrapolation” in a DWI case was error, because the State offered no evidence that the defendant in that case was in a “post-absorptive” state that might render a retrograde extrapolation calculation relevant. In Babich, the expert merely assumed that...
Continue ReadingJust four days after my blog post lamenting the use of presumptively unconstitutional roadblocks in Durham, Police Chief C.J. Davis announced that this intrusive and offensive tactic will no longer be used by the Durham police. According to Chief Davis, effective immediately as of March 5, 2017, “checkpoints in the city of Durham have been directed to cease and...
Continue ReadingLaw enforcement agencies in Durham County periodically set up “DWI Checking Stations,” at which every driver is stopped, detained, and investigated without suspicion of any crime. Sound unconstitutional? Sound like an excerpt from a dystopian novel? Well, the United States Supreme Court of the United States held in City of Indianapolis v. Edmond (2000) that DUI/DWI checkpoints are presumptively unconstitutional. The...
Continue ReadingIn the fiscal year 2015-2016, local police in Durham arrested and charged 902 individuals with Driving While Impaired and related charges, including Driving After Consuming While Under the Age of 21 (77 cases). A substantial percentage of those charges occurred on Friday and Saturday nights, when individuals are often driving home after consuming alcohol and the local police are...
Continue ReadingWe often recommend challenging your DWI in either a pretrial suppression hearing, or at trial, or both. But we also recommend being prepared in the event that you are convicted of Driving While Impaired. In order to assess the potential consequences in your case, we’ll need to know certain details about your history and the unique facts of your...
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