Update: On February 16, the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued an opinion in State v. Davis, in which law enforcement officers were allowed to offer lay testimony without objection that the substance the defendant sold them was crack cocaine. In a footnote, the Davis panel stated that Llamas-Hernandez did not overrule Freeman as to an officer’s lay opinion identifying crack cocaine. In any event, the panel found that Llamas-Hernandez did not control the case at bar because the defendant in Davis had failed to challenge the admissibility of the officers’ testimony. Meadows was not cited. Original Post: On January 5, the North Carolina Court of Appeals handed down yet another opinion addressing the admissibility of visual identifications of drugs, State v. Meadows. Defendant Meadows was convicted of possession of cocaine after Detective Springs, concealed in “the hedge and the darkness,” leaped out and shined his flashlight on Meadows, who then threw a plastic bag with white contents to the ground. The State put on evidence that the white substance was crack cocaine based on: 1) the results of the NarTest machine, and 2) the testimony of Detective Springs. The bulk of the opinion deals with the NarTest, which purports to identify controlled substances using florescence. Held: the trial court abused its discretion in allowing an officer to give expert testimony regarding the NarTest because there was insufficient evidence of the reliability of the testing method. Aside from the disfavored NarTest, the State’s only evidence that the substance was crack was [...]
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