The Setup I can’t count the number of police reports I’ve read that start with a routine traffic stop for speeding, at some classic Raleigh Police speed trap like Glenwood Avenue by the Carolina Country Club or south of downtown on S. Dawson Street, and then it all escalates into a DWI investigation because the cop-on-duty “detects an odor...
Continue ReadingThe Klan announced a “victory parade” at the news that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States. After all, Trump gave the rhetoric of hate a home at the center of his campaign. He made blanket statements describing Mexicans as “rapists,” and described Mexico itself as “our enemy.” Trump refused to condemn David Duke, America’s...
Continue Reading* According to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, in a hyperbolic defense of his state’s imposition of a new law that gives the police yet another reason to intrude on your ability to travel freely without interference by law enforcement. They’re calling it “E-DUI” — driving under the influence of electronic devices. Meanwhile in every city in America: It will...
Continue ReadingThe 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...
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