[Editor's note: I'm on vacation Friday, so I'm posting this roundup Thursday night.] We welcomed a group of new magistrates at the School of Government this week. I like working with magistrates for lots of reasons, one of which is that they ask a lot of good questions. At least one upcoming blog post will attempt to answer a question that I was asked this week. In the meantime: 1. A superior court judge in Durham dismissed a murder case this week, ruling that the state improperly allowed the decedent's bones to be returned to her family after the defense filed a motion to preserve all the physical evidence in the case. WRAL has the story here. A News and Observer story I read previously described the judge's ruling as being based on the Brady line of cases, though it seems that Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51 (1988), may be closer to the mark. I haven't seen the order itself. Stay tuned, since the state plans to appeal. 2. The Fourth Circuit just decided United States v. Simmons, a big en banc case which holds that, when determining whether a federal criminal defendant's prior North Carolina conviction was punishable by more than a year in prison and so is a "felony" for purposes of the recidivist provisions of the federal drug laws, the federal courts must look at the actual sentence that the particular defendant could have received under Structured Sentencing, not the maximum sentence that any defendant could have received. [...]
Faculty Coordinators
