Court of Appeals in State v. Townsend Beefs Up Prejudice Required for Relief under Knoll

[Author's note:  State v. Townsend was withdrawn and replaced by a subsequent opinion, available here.  The portion of the opinion discussed below was unchanged by the subsequent opinion.] No one gets relief any more under State v. Knoll—at least not from the court of appeals.  State v. Townsend, decided today, is the latest in a series of post-Knoll cases in which the defendant failed to establish that he was prejudiced by a magistrate’s alleged statutory violations in setting conditions of pre-trial release, and, thus, failed to establish a basis for dismissal of the charges. Facts. The defendant in Townsend was arrested at a DWI checkpoint in Charlotte around 11:30 p.m. Forty-five minutes later, he submitted to breath testing in the Breath Alcohol Testing vehicle located at the scene, registering a 0.10 on his first test and a 0.09 on his second. The defendant called his wife to tell her he had been arrested. He told her that he or someone would call her later to come pick him up.  The arresting officer then took the defendant to the Mecklenburg County Jail, where he was admitted at 12:56 a.m. The record of events gets a bit more confusing from here.  While the opinion states that the defendant appeared before a magistrate at 2:54 a.m. (some two hours after arriving at the jail), it also adopts the trial court’s finding that the defendant signed an implied consent offense notice (form AOC-CR-271) in front of the magistrate at 2:34 a.m., listing his wife’s name and [...]