North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

During trial preparation, years after her controlled drug buys, an informant was looking at the state’s file when she saw defendant’s DMV photo – the only photo in the file – and was asked whether this was the person who ...

Tagged with: Criminal Practice

Defendant argues he should not have been convicted of soliciting a child under the age of 16 by computer because he had no definite plans to meet with 15-year-old “Danielle” before her sixteenth birthday. However, the state offered testimony from ...

Tagged with: Criminal Practice

The plaintiff-mortgage company alleges that its spreadsheet of information about past, present and future clients constitutes a trade secret. Although some of this information might be shared with third parties or might otherwise be in the public domain, plaintiff alleges ...

Tagged with: Tort-Negligence

The First Step Act allows a district court to reject a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for a defendant convicted of possession with intent to distribute 50 or more grams of methamphetamine if, among other things, “the defendant does not have—(A) ...

Tagged with: Criminal Practice

Plaintiff alleges a violation of South Carolina’s Financial Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Protection Act based on defendant’s website requiring plaintiff to enter six digits of his social security number in order to learn whether he had been affected by ...

Tagged with: Civil Practice

As they are ordinarily understood, the terms used in South Carolina’s disorderly conduct statute – “disorderly,” “boisterous,” “obscene,” and “profane” – make it hard to escape the conclusion that any person passing a schoolyard during recess is likely witnessing a ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

In denying disability benefits to plaintiff, who has suffered from and been treated for chronic depression for many years, the administrative law judge erred in according little weight to the opinion of plaintiff’s treating psychiatrist and in cherry-picking the few ...

Tagged with: Administrative

Years after the defendant-agencies developed their original environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed bridge over Currituck Sound, the state renewed its plans to build the bridge. In the interim, coastal development and traffic projections decreased, and expected sea level ...

Tagged with: Environmental

Even though plaintiff’s decedent, an ERISA plan participant, was incapacitated by illness during the period when he could have converted his employer-provided life insurance policy to an individual policy, and even though the participant tried to make the conversion 26 ...

Tagged with: Insurance

To the extent several subsections of North Carolina’s Property Protection Act punish newsgathering activities, those subsections violate the First Amendment. We affirm the district court’s determination that the subsections or the Property Protection Act (the Act) violate plaintiffs’ constitutional rights ...

Tagged with: Constitutional