North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

  A police department’s failure to follow its own policies in not giving an officer enough time to prepare for a disciplinary hearing that led to his termination was a violation of the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantee of a fundamental ...

Tagged with: police

  The city of Raleigh will pay $2 million to 15 plaintiffs who claim that officers with the Raleigh Police Department used brown sugar and an unreliable confidential informant to frame them for drug trafficking.  Abraham Rubert-Schewel and Emily Gladden of ...

Tagged with: Civil Rights

  The murder of George Floyd amplified cries for police reform that grow louder with each incident of excessive use of force and unjustified killings by officers. But in Congress and many statehouses, the initial enthusiasm for reform has so far yet to be ...

Tagged with: police reform

  More than three-quarters of the applicants who sat for July’s bar exam passed the exam, in what administrators say was likely to be the final remotely proctored bar exam before moving back to in-person exams for 2022.  Of the 817 ...

Tagged with: Bar Exam

A woman who was injured by an allegedly distracted driver has agreed to a mediated settlement of $4.5 million, her attorney reports.   William Goldfarb of Monroe reports that his client was turning left when the defendant, who was traveling approximately 55 mph in ...

Tagged with: Distracted Driver

  H.H. Holmes, considered by some to be America’s first serial killer, would sometimes take out life insurance policies on his intended victims. This entrepreneurialism had several consequences, one of which was Holmes’ execution in 1896. It also helped motivate ...

Tagged with: first impression life insurance

  A defendant whose probation was revoked by a district court judge won’t be able to appeal that decision to superior court because he waived his right to a revocation hearing, the North Carolina Court of Appeals has unanimously ruled ...

Tagged with: waiver

  The constitutional right to counsel is a right to competent and effective counsel, but in North Carolina, there are concerns that the public defense system created to defend those who can’t afford to defend themselves is failing. The executive director of the state’s Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS), Mary Pollard, said that many ...

Tagged with: Indigent Defense

  A criminal defendant doesn’t forfeit their right to remain silent by giving pre-trial notice of their intent to offer the affirmative defense of duress, and prosecutors may not preemptively impeach a defendant during its case-in-chief, the North Carolina Supreme ...

Tagged with: duress