Blanket Objection by State to Fact-Findings Sufficient to Trigger De Novo Review in DWI Case

If you decide to read yesterday’s court of appeals opinion in State v. Miller, ___ N.C. App. ___ (May 17, 2016) do yourself a favor and skip to page 9.  Not having the benefit of this advice, I got lost on page 3. At first, I thought my printer had malfunctioned, since page 3 seemed to be saying the same thing as page 2. But there’s no problem with my printer. I can’t say the same for the procedural history in this case. Tortured is not a sufficiently negative adjective to describe its path. Fortunately, things pick up half way through the opinion and an important rule emerges:  The State may obtain a de novo hearing in superior court under G.S. 20-38.7(a) without setting forth the specific findings of fact to which it objects. So that’s the rule. Unless the senior resident superior court judge says otherwise.  You’re going to have to read the rest of this post to make sense of that. The first nine pages. I summarized the procedural history of State v. Miller here.  Yesterday’s opinion is the court of appeals’ response to the remand from the state supreme court. Implied consent procedures. Miller arises from litigation in an impaired driving case.  District court judges in DWI cases don’t just rule on motions to suppress and dismiss as they do in other cases. Instead, they must enter preliminary determinations, which the State may appeal to superior court. If the State disputes the findings of fact as well as the proposed [...]