May a Magistrate Conduct an Initial Appearance at a Hospital?

Sometimes a defendant is injured prior to or during arrest. When the injury is serious, the defendant may need to go directly to the hospital. May a judicial official, such as a magistrate, come to the hospital to conduct the defendant’s initial appearance? A federal magistrate judge did just that for Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and I’m told that some North Carolina magistrates have occasionally done the same. How does this come up? G.S. 15A-501 requires that an officer “take the person arrested before a judicial official without unnecessary delay” for an initial appearance. Because of that statutory mandate, and because arresting agencies generally are responsible for maintaining custody of hospitalized arrestees until the initial appearance takes place – a task that may occupy personnel and consume other resources – arresting officers sometimes ask magistrates to conduct initial appearances in hospitals. (Alternatively, officers sometimes “unarrest” suspects who are admitted to a hospital, or simply leave them there under the watchful eye of hospital staff. I doubt that the former practice is lawful and the latter raises liability concerns, but those issues are beyond the scope of this post.) What’s the law? There’s very little authority on the permissible location of initial appearances in North Carolina. In the impaired driving context, there is a specific statute authorizing magistrates to conduct initial appearances away from the courthouse: G.S. 20-38.4 states that “[a] magistrate may hold an initial appearance at any place within the county and shall, to the extent practicable, be [...]