There’s a lot going on this week! The removal hearing in Durham concerning District Attorney Tracey Cline has ended, with Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood promising a decision Friday morning. The dispute over consent searches in Fayetteville has taken a new turn, with a judge entering a temporary restraining order requiring the city to lift its moratorium on the use of such searches in connection with traffic stops. The police are set to resume consent searches on Monday, apparently using a new written consent form. In other news: The repercussions of United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court’s GPS tracking case, are still being felt. The FBI recently revealed that it turned off 3,000 warrantless tracking devices in response to the decision. Jones won’t stop the march of technology, though. This week, everyone got something new. Law enforcement – specifically, the NYPD – announced a new long-range concealed gun detector, currently effective at 3 to 5 meters but planned to function at up to 25 meters. Suspects with cell phones, which is to say, all suspects, got a little help from prominent Seventh Circuit judge Richard Posner, who suggested that there may be limits to officers’ authority to search such devices incident to arrest. (The little case law that we have in North Carolina is to the contrary, as I noted here.) Finally, federal prisoners will soon be able to buy and use MP3 players so they can rock out to their choice of 1 million songs. I suppose it was [...]
Faculty Coordinators
