The Docket: Supreme Court Races Gets Personal

In This Edition:

• The Griffin-Riggs race gets personal
• N.C. Court of Appeals to hear Chandler case
• Questions about a fatal car chase in Raleigh
• Asheville Blade reporters get another shot

Amid the legal battle over a seat on the N.C. Supreme Court that has now dragged on for four months, both Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs and Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin say they have received violent threats.

The marshals of the state Supreme Court have launched an investigation into those threats, Graham Wilson, a spokesman for the state court system, said in an email Friday. He declined to provide any details. 

Last week, Griffin issued a news release through his family’s private attorney, Blannie Miller, in which he and his wife, Katye, announced a personal tragedy—the death of their daughter, Maggie, who was born prematurely—and alleged that the family had been “subjected to vicious personal attacks targeting them at their home.” 

“Even after the groups coordinating these activities were notified about the family’s recent tragedy, the cruel attacks continued,” Miller said in the statement. She has declined to identify the groups because she said that’s still being investigated and she wants the focus to be on stopping the attacks. 

It was the first substantial statement Griffin has made since he first sought to disqualify some 66,000 ballots in an effort to overturn the election results. Griffin trails Riggs by 734 votes, a tally that has withstood two recounts, but he wants to throw out ballots from early and absentee voters he says had incomplete registration information, absentee overseas voters who never lived in N.C. but are registered to vote here, and military and overseas voters who were exempted from the state’s voter ID law. Griffin hasn’t argued that the voters did anything wrong; he claims State Board of Elections rules that allowed them to vote are illegal. 

This has sparked a legal battle that has ping-ponged between state and federal courts and has enraged many voters whose ballots are in question. But Griffin now says things have gone too far. Miller said in an interview that organized groups have orchestrated a harassment campaign against the Griffins, resulting in more than 100 threatening letters and postcards, many from around the country, coming to their eastern N.C. home. Miller, however, declined to provide copies of letters and postcards, saying she doesn’t want to do anything to encourage more attacks. . 

Miller also said that Griffin’s wife has seen fliers featuring an editorial by Bob Hall, former director of Democracy North Carolina, criticizing Jefferson Griffin in their neighborhood and on cars parked outside a grocery store after she has finished shopping. Hall told Anderson Alerts that he has been circulating the fliers in an effort to inform people about Griffin’s election protests, and that it is wrong to conflate the fliers with any kind of threat to Griffin and his family. 

The Riggs campaign said the justice has also gotten violent threats online and in mail sent to her home. A campaign spokeswoman provided copies of some of those threats on the condition that the contents not be published. 

“I am so grateful to the Supreme Court Marshals and local law enforcement who have continued to work hard to keep my family and Judge Griffin’s family safe,” Riggs said in a statement. “My heart breaks for the Griffin family’s loss and my prayers are with them through this difficult time.” 

The legal battle is now pending with the state Court of Appeals, which has set oral arguments in front of a three-judge panel for March 21. 

—Michael Hewlett

Have any suggestions for improving this newsletter or stories we should look into? Email us at courts@theassemblync.com.

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N.C. Court of Appeals to Hear Chandler Case

The N.C. Court of Appeals has agreed to review the case of Junior Chandler, a Madison County man who has alleged he was wrongfully convicted of sexually abusing children he transported to daycare nearly 40 years ago. 

Chandler, 67, is currently serving two life terms, plus 21 years, after a jury convicted him in 1987 of 12 counts of child sexual abuse. He is one of more than 150 people caught up in a widespread panic over child-sexual abuse in the 1980s, many at child care centers. Over the years, many of those cases fell apart, resulting in dismissed charges and exonerations. That included N.C.’s own Little Rascals case. 

Chandler asked the appellate court to review Superior Court Judge Gary Gavenus’ ruling following a three-day evidentiary hearing in August 2023. Up until the last few pages of the decision, it appeared that Gavenus would overturn the conviction after finding that prosecutors withheld significant favorable evidence from Chandler’s defense attorneys and allowed testimony from summaries of interviews with alleged victims that contained “outright fabrications.” 

Instead, Gavenus upheld Chandler’s conviction, ruling that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him at trial. 

Chandler’s attorneys, Jim Coleman and Jamie Lau of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke University School of Law, have previously argued that the medical evidence used against Chandler is no longer credible and that prosecutors ignored other evidence that poked holes in their case against Chandler.

Coleman said he is happy that the Court of Appeals will review Gavenus’ decision. He said he and Lau asked the Attorney General’s office to admit that errors Gavenus found in his ruling were significant. 

“We questioned whether the State could defend a conviction that was the product of such pervasive misconduct, including actual fabrication of evidence, as the lower court found,” Coleman said. “Apparently, the middle of an election year was not a good time to raise such a question.” 

The N.C. Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 It will take months before the Court of Appeals issues a decision. 

—Michael Hewlett

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Questions About a Fatal Chase

Noted civil rights attorneys Ben Crump and Bakari Sellers were in Raleigh last week to raise awareness about an October 7, 2024 Highway Patrol chase that led to the death of Tyrone Mason, a 31-year-old father of four, in a single-car wreck.

Crump and Sellers told reporters they plan to file a lawsuit in the next several weeks over the incident. The victim’s mother, Henrietta Mason, told reporters that she has had suspicions about the narrative since law enforcement first delivered the news that her son was dead. 

At first, they told her that law enforcement just came upon the car after the wreck. She later learned that there had been a chase that led the Highway Patrol to put the two state troopers involved on leave. The case also has prompted Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman to drop at least 180 cases involving Trooper Garrett Macario and his supervisor Matthew Morrison.

INDY Week has more on Henrietta Mason’s quest for answers and the rallying cry for release of the troopers’ body camera footage. The attorneys contend the footage could give the public a better idea of what happened.

—Anne Blythe

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Blade Reporters Get Another Shot

The state Court of Appeals has withdrawn its February 19 ruling against two Asheville Blade journalists and agreed to reconsider their case.

The First Amendment Clinic at Duke University”s law school filed a motion on March 9 seeking to amend the record to give reporters Matilda Bliss and Melissa Coit another chance to argue that the trespass charges filed against them while they were working were unconstitutional. The two were arrested while covering a protest in a public park on Christmas Day 201.

Eugene Soar, clerk for the appellate court, issued the March 11 order announcing the decision to withdraw a three-judge panel’s previous ruling that rejected the appeal seemingly due to a lack of paperwork instead of on the merits of their First Amendment arguments.

The three Republican appellate judges wrote in that ruling that there was no “supporting documentation” before them of Bliss and Coit being tried and convicted in district court so they were “unable to verify jurisdiction.”

The Duke clinic’s March 9 motion cites four arguments for the appellate judges to weigh::

• There are statements agreed to as fact by both parties already in the record that should have been sufficient to show that the reporters were tried and convicted in District Court before appealing their case to Superior Court.
• Those binding findings of fact should have rendered dismissal on the grounds cited as improper.
• Dismissal on appeal for those reasons in a criminal case are only appropriate when the record is “completely silent on a jurisdiction issue—which is not the case here.”
• And finally, dismissal on such a “readily correctable record defect” contradicts the “Supreme Court’s preference to hear cases on the merits.”

The journalists were covering law enforcement clearing a homeless camp from a public Asheville park with a 10 p.m. curfew and the protests that followed. The Buncombe County district attorney has argued that Bliss and Coit violated a “content neutral” city ordinance by staying in the park. .

The case could have broad impact on parameters for journalists covering protests and law enforcement actions in public spaces across the state, press freedom advocates say.

—Anne Blythe

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Around The State