Most of the office chatter around the SOG this week concerned the new lawsuit challenging the recently-enacted retention election procedure for North Carolina Supreme Court Justices. The basic question is whether that procedure satisfies the state constitution’s requirement that justices be elected. The Fayetteville Observer has more information here. But that wasn’t the only interesting story of the week. NCBA post Judicial Performance Evaluation Survey results. They’re available here. A later survey will assess recently-appointed judges and non-incumbents seeking election. Freddie Gray trial begins. Recall that several law enforcement officers have been charged criminally in connection with the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The first trial started this week. WRAL has the story here. DNA analysis is now so good, it’s bad. Or so suggests this post at the Geekquinox blog about the possibility of detecting “transfer DNA.” The idea is that when A touches B, and B then touches some evidence or is present at a crime scene, a small amount of A’s DNA may be transferred to the evidence or the scene, and that DNA may be detected by today’s sensitive forensic testing techniques, creating the misleading impression that A touched the evidence or was at the scene. I don’t know how likely detection of such “transfer DNA” is, but the report at least calls into question the idea of DNA invincibility. Alabama officers reportedly plant drugs on African-Americans . . . maybe. This local article from Alabama made a huge splash this week by claiming that “[a] [...]
Faculty Coordinators
