My colleagues and I usually spend the waning weeks of May slogging through months of appellate opinions, determining which cases merit discussion at upcoming summer conferences. This year, of course, there are no live summer conferences. Yet we are still slogging. We are delivering a virtual criminal case update for district court judges this week and will be offering similar on-line instruction to other court officials and advocates in the weeks to come. In the seven months since the fall conferences, our appellate courts have addressed a number of significant -- and, in some instances, novel -- issues related to the investigation and prosecution of impaired driving offenses. Even though you can find summaries of all recent appellate decisions here on the blog, I thought readers might appreciate a post aggregating recent DWI-specific holdings. Destruction of evidence. When the State destroys or fails to preserve material, exculpatory evidence, it violates a defendant’s right to due process. State v. Taylor, 362 N.C. 514 (2008); see also NC Defender Manual Vol. 1, Pretrial (2d ed. 2013), at 7. Thus, when the State destroyed a poster displayed in the district attorney’s office that displayed two pictures of the defendant, the first with the caption “Before he sued the D.A.’s office,” and the second, depicting the defendant with injuries and captioned, “After he sued the D.A.’s office,” dismissal of assault charges based on a due process violation was proper. State v. Williams, 362 N.C. 628 (2008). When, on the other hand, the State destroys or [...]
Faculty Coordinators
