Case Summaries: N.C. Court of Appeals (Feb. 2, 2021)

This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on February 2, 2021. Gabrielle Supak and Jamie Markham prepared these summaries. As always, they will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present. Double jeopardy barred retrying the defendant when his first trial ended in a mistrial that was not justified by manifest necessity. State v. Grays, ___ N.C. App. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___ (Feb. 2, 2021). In this Bertie County case, the defendant was charged with first-degree murder and felony possession of a weapon by a prisoner for an alleged fight at Bertie Correctional Institution that left another inmate dead. After court adjourned on the first day of the defendant’s trial, one of the State’s witnesses, the prison’s assistant superintendent, told the prosecutor for the first time that the defendant’s blood-stained clothes from the day of the alleged incident were at the prison and had never been turned over to law enforcement. (The prosecutor was clearly frustrated by the oversight and the trial judge called it “ridiculous.”) The next morning, the State moved for a mistrial, arguing that it would be unfair to proceed with the trial without first testing the evidence, because it could be either corroborative or exculpatory depending what DNA testing showed. After a hearing on the issue, the trial court granted the State’s motion, concluding as a matter of law that “it is in the public’s interest in a fair [...]