Criminal procedure aficionados, close your red books and riddle me this: A district court judge in a DWI case preliminarily grants a defendant’s motion to suppress. The State appeals to superior court. The superior court affirms the district court’s determination and remands the case for entry of an order suppressing the evidence and dismissing the charges. The district court enters the order. Does the State have the right to appeal? That’s the essence of the question the court of appeals answered yesterday in State v. Parisi, ___ N.C. App. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___ (2017). The answer? No, the State has no right to appeal from the district court’s final order. Why? There is no statutory right to appeal from a final order by a district court suppressing evidence. And, on these facts, neither the superior court nor the district court was authorized to dismiss the charges. Here’s what happened. Parisi was stopped at a checkpoint and subsequently arrested for DWI. He moved before trial to suppress evidence on the basis that the State lacked probable cause to arrest him. The district court judge entered a written order preliminarily indicating his intent to grant the motion to suppress. Unfortunately, the order was captioned “Preliminary Order of Dismissal” even though it did not address the dismissal of the charges. The State appealed the preliminary order to superior court. On appeal, the superior court granted “Defendant’s Motion to Suppress and Motion to Dismiss” and remanded the case for entry of such an order in [...]
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