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Plans for new development often cause community divides, but a dispute over what should happen to 21 acres in Carteret County has caused more than your typical rift.
Construction at the Bridge View subdivision in the small town of Cedar Point has been stalled for more than a year after the unearthing of Native American burial sites and artifacts that date as far back as 1,000 BC, on what many believe to be ancestral lands of the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina.
On June 23, a group of Native Americans from across the state met at the site for a ceremony and prayers. “[M]ost of our sacred protected burial village sites and sacred places have been farmed, cultivated and surveyed, and are either in a box in a college department or in a museum or state cultural affairs office,” Crystal Cavalier-Keck, a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation and environmental justice organizer, told a group of reporters last week. “A burial site and village are the most important connections to our past, especially here in North Carolina as we are first-contact tribes.”
But an altercation at the event led to the arrest last week of former Onslow County sheriff’s deputy James Gilbert Delao Jr.
Delao, who worked for the department for nearly 10 years and lived at Cedar Point, was charged with assault on a female, communicating threats, and filing a false police report related to a heated incident in which one woman was thrown to the ground and a man who tried to help her was pushed and held down for nearly half a minute.
Video captured at the scene shows Delao and several people from the neighborhood confronting the visitors as they were leaving. People start shouting at each other and then a man who Native Americans at the scene identified as Delao can be seen pushing a woman to the ground.
The initial police response resulted in charges filed against a Native American person based on reports that a resident had been stabbed with a knife. Those charges have since been dropped and charges were instead filed against Delao.
In a statement, Onslow County Sheriff Chris Thomas said he was aware of the incident but also pointed out that Delao’s employment with his department ended on July 12. The sheriff said Delao was working as a bailiff at the time of the encounter, but declined to elaborate on personnel matters and said his department was not involved in the Carteret County investigation.
— Anne Blythe
Smell Test 2.0
Greensboro police officers arrested Tyron Dobson in January 2021 over a smell.
Officers searched the vehicle he was in after claiming they smelled a faint odor of marijuana. But as his attorney, Benjamin Kull, has argued in a similar case, it’s no longer enough to claim to smell marijuana because hemp is now legal in North Carolina–and hemp and marijuana smell exactly the same.
As we wrote in April, experts say the criminal justice system has not caught up to the paradigm shift that hemp legalization has caused. A memo from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation warned about exactly this situation before hemp was legalized.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals has consistently ruled that the smell of marijuana can still be used as probable cause, including in Dobson’s case.
Now, Kull has filed a petition asking the state Supreme Court to step in.
Phil Dixon, a professor at UNC’s School of Government, said if the state Supreme Court takes it up, it would be the first time it has weighed in on the issue. So far, the Court of Appeals has avoided answering the question of whether smell alone can still be used as probable cause for a search, Dixon said, instead finding that law-enforcement officers had something other than smell to justify the search. In Dobson’s case, officers pointed to the smell of cologne–which they said was used to cover up the alleged marijuana.
Kull argues in his petition that cologne can’t be used to bolster probable cause if officers can’t tell the difference between marijuana and hemp.
“The General Assembly has decided that we, the People, can legally possess and use one form of cannabis,” Kull wrote. “We can now walk into a store, buy a pre-rolled hemp cigarette, and then step back outside and light up. Yet the Attorney General believes that if we engage in that perfectly lawful conduct while wearing cologne, we thereby surrender our Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.”
—Michael Hewlett
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An Answer To Prayer
The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board has stopped beginning its meetings with Christian prayer.
The decision comes after the Freedom from Religious Foundation challenged the constitutionality of the school board’s practice. As we wrote in May, Chris Line, a staff attorney with the group, sent a letter to board chair Deanna Kaplan on April 25 calling the prayers “coercive, insensitive and intimidating.” They force nonreligious people to choose between openly not praying, he wrote, or “display deference to a religious sentiment in which they do not believe.”
The nonprofit, which is based in Wisconsin and has more than 40,000 members across the country, including 900 in North Carolina, became involved after a parent complained.
“Board members are free to pray privately or to worship on their own time in their own way,” Line wrote. Line specifically cited a prayer board member Susan Miller gave at an April 16 meeting. Kaplan told The Assembly that the purpose of the invocation was to set a tone for the meeting and was meant more for the board members than the audience.
The Winston-Salem Journal reported that Miller has led the prayers since she was elected to the board in 2022. Prior to that, board member Lida Calvert-Hayes led the prayer, the paper said. At its most recent meetings, Miller has read quotes from famous people such as NBA basketball star Michael Jordan, followed by a moment of silence, in lieu of a prayer.
School district officials said they still don’t believe that the prayers were unconstitutional, but decided to open meetings in other ways.
“Many boards in the state have elected to use multiple different options to open meetings in light of recent case law in jurisdictions around the country, “ they wrote in a statement.
—Michael Hewlett
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