Case Summaries: N.C. Supreme Court (Oct. 29, 2021)

This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Supreme Court released on October 29, 2021. As always, these summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present. There was sufficient evidence that the defendant committed multiple assaults against his girlfriend where a “distinct interruption” occurred between the assaults State v. Dew, ___ N.C. ___, 2021-NCSC-124 (Oct. 29, 2021).  There was sufficient evidence that the defendant committed multiple assaults against his girlfriend and the Court was equally divided as to whether there was sufficient evidence to establish that the defendant used his hands, feet, or teeth as deadly weapons.  The Court characterized “the question of how to delineate between assaults—to know where one assault ends and another begins—in order to determine whether the State may charge a defendant with multiple assaults” as an issue of first impression.  Reviewing case law, the Court explained that a single assault “might refer to a single harmful contact or several harmful contacts within a single incident,” depending on the facts.  The Court declined to extend the three-factor analysis of State v. Rambert, 341 N.C. 173 (1995), applicable to discharging a firearm into occupied property, to assault cases generally, saying that the Rambert factors were “not the ideal analogy” because of differences in the nature of the acts of discharging a firearm and throwing a punch or kick.  The Court determined that a defendant may be charged with more than one assault only [...]