What kind of true evidence should the jury get to hear?
It is hard to believe that the election on November 3rd for the Supreme Court of North Carolina may come down to one case decided in 1988 by the State Supreme Court, State v. Carter. 322 N.C. 709. The two candidates have split in writing on that question. Incumbent Justice Anita Earls wrote a vigorous dissent in State v. Rogers, 388 N.C. 453, 920 S.E2d 775 (2025) stating that State v. Carter should not be overruled. Representative Sarah Stevens in 2011 voted along with 81 members of the State House including 65 Republicans and 16 Democrats and with 48 members of the State Senate including 30 Republicans and 18 Democrats, signed by Governor Bev Perdue as follows: Section 2. of Session Law 2011-6,
“The General Assembly respectfully requests that the North Carolina Supreme Court reconsider, and overrule, its holding in State v. Carter that the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule which exists under federal law does not apply under North Carolina State law.”
What does Justice Anita Earls know that almost the entire Legislature, the Democratic Governor, and three Democratic Supreme Court Justices did not see? The wisdom of Carter is for voters in 2026 to decide. Let me share with you the facts of that case in enough detail so that you understand the consequences.
Salient facts in State v. Carter:
Robert Lee Carter was convicted of first-degree rape and first-degree kidnapping.
Carter entered the home of the 78-year-old victim, forcing her outside through her backyard and a plowed field, raping her, severely beating her, and leaving her unconscious. He was convicted November 3, 1986. The key issue was whether taking Carter’s blood without a search warrant violated Article I, § 20 of the North Carolina Constitution. The Carter Court treated the blood draw as a protected “search” and found no exigency justifying it. Carter’s blood type had been determined at trial through analysis of the blood sample obtained on the authority of a nontestimonial identification order signed by a judge. The Carter Court found that the first judge used the wrong procedure and that Carter should get a new trial. At that time the rape victim was 80 to 81 years old. The new trial could have taken place when she was 82 years old, reliving once again what she experienced four years earlier.
What did Chief Justice Burley Mitchell, John Webb, and Louis Meyer (all Democrats), say about it:
MITCHELL, Justice, dissenting.
By refusing to permit the introduction of evidence seized by officers acting in the honest belief that a court order authorizing its seizure was lawful, this Court gives much greater protection to criminal defendants than they have been given by the Supreme Court of the United States. In fact, the Supreme Court has specifically stated in a similar situation, “[W]e refuse to rule that an officer is required to disbelieve a judge who has just advised him, by word and by action, that the warrant he possesses authorizes him to conduct the search he has requested.” We should take the same position as to the court ordered search in this case.
In its failing effort to strike a proper balance between the guarantee against unreasonable searches and the public safety, the majority has chosen to place such a heavy thumb on the scales of justice that they will always weigh in favor of the criminal defendant. The inflexible exclusionary rule the majority has selected for North Carolina will not advance the right to be free from unlawful searches, but it will prevent trial courts from reaching the truth and convicting the guilty in a substantial number of cases.
To do otherwise serves no valid purpose, substantially interferes with enforcement of the criminal law and diminishes the integrity of the judicial branch of government.
One need only read any daily newspaper on a regular basis to know that civil judgments against law enforcement officers for violations of constitutional rights are no longer unusual.
Indeed, it is now quite possible for evidence unlawfully seized to be excluded in a criminal case against an accused, while the accused receives additional or double relief in the form of a civil judgment for the same violation of rights.
The high-minded quotations relied upon by the majority warn against permitting courts to be used to further the designs of law enforcement officers who intentionally break the law to gather evidence against criminals. All courts have taken those warnings to heart, and evidence seized by intentionally unlawful methods has been excluded under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States for decades. Further, evidence seized by such intentionally unlawful means is not rendered admissible by the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. The majority simply has chased a constitutional rabbit which was caught and skinned long ago.
In the present case, officers relying in good faith upon a written judicial order took a sample of the defendant’s blood for analysis and use as evidence. It should be obvious to anyone that excluding this evidence will not deter other officers from making similar mistakes in good faith as to the legal validity of court orders upon which they rely. When following judicial orders in the future, the officers still will not know they are doing anything wrong. Therefore, unlike punishment of intentionally unlawful conduct by officers, which the exclusionary rule arguably deters, punishment of an officer’s good faith reliance on a judicial order cannot deter future similar conduct.
This Court should adopt the same common-sense reasoning expressed in such statements by the Supreme Court of the United States and apply it here. Regrettably, however, the majority chooses to be more dogmatic and doctrinaire than the Supreme Court of the United States in protecting criminal defendants by excluding evidence uncovered through honest mistakes of officers acting in good faith reliance upon court orders.
As I believe the majority has today dramatically tilted the scales of justice in favor of criminal defendants for no good or beneficial reason whatsoever, I respectfully dissent.
LOUIS MEYER and JOHN WEBB, JJ., join in this dissenting opinion.
Finally, State v. Carter was overruled in 2026:
Opinion by Chief Justice Paul Newby (for himself and four Associate Justices).
For all these reasons, Carter is expressly overruled. Without Carter, our precedent only implies that an exclusionary rule arises from Article I, Section 20, though it has never been formally decided.
We are left to decide whether any exclusionary rule arising under Article I, Section 20 contains a good faith exception. The State asks us to adopt a good faith exception in line with the federal good faith exception. While “we interpret the North Carolina Constitution independently of the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Federal Constitution,” we are persuaded by the reasoning articulated by the Supreme Court for adopting a federal good faith exception in Leon. After all, when “[c]onsidering the precise wording of Article I, Section 20, we find no support … that the ‘text’ itself calls for ‘broader’ protection than that of the Fourth Amendment.” Thus, we adopt the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Leon, to hold that there is a good faith exception to any exclusionary rule arising from Article I, Section 20 of our state constitution equivalent to the federal good faith exception to the exclusionary rule arising out of the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Earls dissented in State v. Rogers: in pertinent part. In full her dissent and that of Chief Justice Burley Mitchell are found at https://paulstam.info/sarah-stevens-
Justice ANITA EARLS dissenting.
The exclusionary rule embodies “a more majestic conception” of constitutional protections—one that “restrains the sovereign itself” and ensures that constitutional “prohibitions are observed in fact.” The principles State v. Carter embraced—judicial integrity, a constitutional right to a remedy, and a deterrence model focused on shaping institutional behavior—are no less vital now than they were in 1988 and in the decades since. This Court should stand by them. I would reaffirm Carter and its progeny and hold that Article I, Section 20 requires exclusion of unconstitutionally obtained evidence with no good faith exception. I respectfully dissent.
- Carter and North Carolina’s Exclusionary Rule
In basic terms, the state constitutional exclusionary rule prevents the state from using evidence it obtained unlawfully against those accused of a crime in a court of law. Nearly forty years ago, this Court in State v. Carter, rooted the state exclusionary rule in three complementary principles: deterring police misconduct, safeguarding judicial integrity, and ensuring that every right indeed has a remedy. A court, we said, cannot hand down the law while profiting from its breach. On that view, we declined to graft a good-faith exception onto the exclusionary rule.
These fundamental principles still emanate from Article I, Section 20 and are grounds to maintain Carter’s vitality.
Start with the hallmark constitutional value of judicial integrity. Courts are not merely passive arbiters—they are co-equal branches of government bound by the same constitutional constraints that limit the executive and legislative branches. Justice Brandeis captured this principle powerfully:
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent, teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.
Carter embraced this understanding: “The preservation of the right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by our state constitution demands that the courts of this state not condone violations thereof by admitting the fruits of illegal searches into evidence.” We recognized that courts cannot maintain their legitimacy while profiting from constitutional violations. As Justice Day wrote in Weeks v. United States:
The tendency of those who execute the criminal laws of the country to obtain conviction by means of unlawful seizures … should find no sanction in the judgments of the courts, which are charged at all times with the support of the Constitution, and to which people of all conditions have a right to appeal for the maintenance of such fundamental rights. 232 U.S. 383, 392, 34 S.Ct. 341, 58 L.Ed. 652 (1914).
Judicial integrity is not some abstract aspiration—it is fundamental to the separation of powers and the rule of law embedded in our constitutional structure. Article IV, Section 1 of our state’s constitution vests “[t]he judicial power of the State” in the courts. When courts admit evidence obtained through constitutional violations, they exercise judicial power in furtherance of executive branch lawlessness. This makes the judiciary complicit in constitutional violations, undermining the very separation of powers the constitution establishes.
Moreover, extensive evidence supports that judicial integrity matters to constitutional legitimacy. The North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct’s first canon requires judges to “uphold the integrity … of the judiciary.” Recent cases from this Court emphasize this foundational principle.
Compellingly too, empirical evidence shows that the exclusionary rule serves judicial integrity while the good faith exception undermines it. One study measured public perceptions of judicial integrity and found that participants in the United States had 62.47% confidence in courts when the exclusionary rule applied compared to only 46.49% confidence when it did not apply. The study found that the good faith exception reduced public confidence by 7.97%. Thus it found empirical evidence of “a resounding endorsement of the exclusionary rule on the basis that it promotes judicial integrity. The exclusionary rule is effective in promoting judicial integrity, and it should be applied more broadly, not more narrowly.” Thus this underpinning of Carter’s reasoning continues to hold purchase—and a good faith exception only undermines these foundational values.
Carter catalogued the practical obstacles to civil remedies: “[T]he disinclination of juries to doubt the testimony of police witnesses about conduct undertaken to protect the public, the doctrine of sovereign immunity, the judgment-proof character of the working police officer, and the difficulty that the aggrieved plaintiff may encounter in finding and paying counsel to represent him in a damage action.”
This creates perverse incentives: Why meticulously document probable cause when thin affidavits + magistrate approval + good faith exception = admissible evidence? Why invest in thorough investigation when shortcuts produce the same result? Why train officers in constitutional nuances when “good faith” is enough?
The exception Carter declined, yet the majority now embraces, does not just fail to deter—it actively encourages constitutional shortcuts. This is not speculation—it is predictable human behavior responding to changed costs and benefits.
So notwithstanding the majority’s rewriting of our opinion in Carter, that case did explain why Section 20 of North Carolina’s Constitution demands exclusion of evidence gathered by violating its terms, and why those principles counsel against a good faith exception. And it did not stand alone: The majority now claims that Colson, Reams, Small, and Arrington only “implied” a state constitutional exclusionary rule without ever holding one exists. But this fundamentally mischaracterizes that precedent. In State v. Colson (1968), this Court held that “evidence obtained by unreasonable search and seizure is inadmissible,” citing both the Fourth Amendment and Article I, Section 15 (now Section 20) of the North Carolina Constitution. The Court explained that after Mapp, “the States are no longer free to adopt or reject at will the exclusionary rule as a means of enforcing the Fourth Amendment in state courts.” Significantly, the Court also noted that “the federal exclusionary rule enunciated in Weeks became statutory law in North Carolina long before Mapp by enactment”—referring to North Carolina’s 1937 statutory exclusion, adopted 24 years before federal mandate.
Now the majority takes this opportunity to expressly overrule Carter and those cases that followed it. The majority’s willingness to discard thirty-seven years of settled precedent undermines legal stability and predictability. Carter has been the foundation for countless judicial decisions, prosecutorial choices, and police training programs. Overruling it creates uncertainty about the scope of constitutional protections and signals that constitutional rights are subject to the shifting political winds of judicial appointments.
The majority offers weak justification for this dramatic departure from precedent. Carter was not clearly erroneous—it reflected a careful analysis of constitutional text, history, and policy considerations. The decision has proven workable in practice and has created the systemic benefits it predicted: better police training, more carefully scrutinized warrants, and improved constitutional compliance. The majority now does little more than “change the time-honored meaning of various portions of our constitution by interpreting the text with the singular aim of reaching a desired outcome.”
- Conclusion
The majority abandons decades of precedent that have served this state well. Its decision to expressly overrule Carter is deeply misguided and a betrayal of Carter’s fundamental principles: judicial integrity, deterrence from police misconduct, and ensuring that every right has a remedy. By adopting a good faith exception, it hollows out the exclusionary rule that Carter so steadily protected. That is a decision about the constitutional rule—achieved through indirection rather than honest analysis. As James Madison warned in Federalist 62, when constitutional protections yield to governmental convenience, we create “a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many.” The Federalist No. 62, at 379 (James Madison). The majority’s decision thus comes at the expense of constitutional liberty and confidence in our rule of law. I would affirm the Court of Appeals’ decision and reaffirm that State v. Carter remains the law of North Carolina. I respectfully dissent.
Justice ALLISON RIGGS joins in this dissenting opinion.
THE AUTHOR’S TAKE ON THIS
Justice Anita Earls thinks that the correct remedy in State v. Carter would have been to have a new trial so that the police could get a warrant signed by a judge, instead of the non-testimonial order signed by another judge, in order to prove once again the blood type of Carter, the rapist of a 78-year-old woman. Rational observers realize that Carter’s blood type would remain the same. Even a complete blood transfusion would not change that.
For the victim the decision in Carter means reliving the crime against her yet again. By the time the new trial was ordered, the victim would have been 80 or 81 years old. Who knows how old she was at the new trial. Probably 82. Why would a wise person think this is a good idea? Why would a voter choose such irrational justice?
Sincerely,
Paul Stam
