Courts

The following cases were adjudicated over four days of District Criminal Court on Aug. 11, 12, 13 and 17 in Bolivia.

Codes: PG, pleaded guilty; PNG/NG, pleaded not guilty, found not guilty; PNG/G, pleaded not guilty, found guilty; BCDC, Brunswick County Detention Center; NCDOC, North Carolina Department of Corrections.

Wednesday, Aug. 11

Judge William F. Fairley presided over the following cases with prosecutor Meredith Everhart and courtroom clerk Jennifer Hearn:

Todd William Apple, operate boat in reckless manner, voluntarily dismissed.

RALEIGH—In February, the North Carolina Innocence Commission exonerated Gregory Taylor, who was serving a life sentence for a 1993 murder he did not commit.

After serving 17 years of his life sentence, Taylor was freed, and N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered an independent review of the State Bureau of Investigations Forensics Laboratory the next month.

Two death row inmates convicted of first-degree murder in Brunswick County have filed appeals under the Racial Justice Act.

District attorney Rex Gore said both death row inmates, Darrell Maness and Daniel Cummings, have filed their appeals with the Brunswick County Clerk of Court, seeking relief from the death penalty under the Racial Justice Act.

Cummings, a Native-American man, was convicted of killing a white man in December 1994.

Maness, a white man, was convicted of killing a white police officer, Mitch Prince, in April 2006.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals recently upheld a conviction of a Brunswick County driver who drove a vehicle while impaired by a nerve pill.

According to a press release from the district attorney’s office, the North Carolina Court of appeals upheld the 2009 impaired driving conviction of Sara Hargrove Landeta-Soto on July 20.

A Brunswick County jury found Landeta-Soto guilty of impaired driving after jurors determined she sideswiped another vehicle on N.C. 130 in July 2006, and then left the scene.