Case Summaries - N.C. Court of Appeals

As Chris Tyner explained here a few weeks ago, the School of Government will be continuing Professor Smith's practice of summarizing recent North Carolina appellate cases on criminal law. The summaries will be posted here on the blog, and also sent out to the criminal law listserv. This post provides summaries of the North Carolina Court of Appeals opinions published on July 2, 2019. 1) Trial court did not err by refusing to give defendant’s requested jury instructions or intervene ex mero motu during prosecutor’s closing argument. State v. Cagle, __ N.C. App. __ (July 2, 2019). The trial court did not err in this murder case by declining to: (i) include a special jury instruction on specific intent in the final mandate; (ii) use the defendant’s requested special instruction on deliberation; or (iii) intervene ex mero motu to strike prosecutor’s comments during closing arguments. (i) On the issue of specific intent, the trial judge gave the jury an instruction regarding voluntary intoxication and its effect on specific intent, but did not repeat the instruction as part of the final mandate. The appellate court held that the defendant failed to preserve the issue by not objecting, and further held that it was not plain error because the trial judge was not required to restate the specific intent instruction in the final mandate. (ii) The defendant also requested a special jury instruction that paraphrased a passage from State v. Buchanan, 287 N.C. 408 (1975) to explain the concept of deliberation. The trial [...]