Sufficiency vs. Admissibility: Drug I.D. after State v. Osborne

In August, the North Carolina Supreme Court weighed in on drug identification once again in State v. Osborne, ___ N.C. ___ (August 16, 2019). I wrote about the earlier Court of Appeals decision in the case, here. The new Osborne decision clarifies the application of drug identification rules as well as sufficiency of the evidence in this context. Osborne and Drug ID recap. The defendant in Osborne was found by officers responding to an overdose call. Once revived, the defendant admitted to officers that she had used heroin. No chemical analysis was presented at trial; the State instead relied on the defendant’s statement, along with officers’ lay identification and field tests of the substance. On appeal, the State argued this evidence was sufficient to support conviction of heroin possession, pointing to a line of decisions that the defendant’s admission that something is a controlled substance, or evidence offered by the defendant to that effect, is sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss despite the lack of a chemical analysis. See State v. Bridges, ___ N.C. App. ___ (Feb 6, 2018) (defendant’s out of court admission that she had meth in her bra sufficient to survive motion to dismiss); State v. Nabors, 365 N.C. 306 (defendant’s evidence at trial identified substance as cocaine and was sufficient); State v. Williams 367 N.C. 64 (2013) (same). These cases created an exception to the rule, established in State v. Ward, 364 N.C. 133 (2010), that the State must generally present a chemical analysis to satisfy [...]