A unanimous three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals has ordered a new trial for Bradley Cooper, the Wake County man convicted of strangling his wife to death in 2008. Appellate judges agreed that the trial Judge Paul Gessner made errors during Cooper’s 2011 trial by blocking certain defense testimony linked to Cooper’s computer.
In other appellate court opinions released this morning:
- A unanimous three-judge panel affirmed a lower-court ruling that a 41-year-old female state employee could not proceed with a lawsuit against the State Health Plan because it wouldn’t cover $23,000 in bills for her efforts to conceive a child through artificial insemination.
- A split 2-1 appellate panel returned to an Orange County trial court the case of a Chapel Hill woman convicted of driving while impaired in 2011 after she was initially stopped by a fire fighter. All three judges agreed the original conviction should be thrown out. The appellate judges disagreed about whether a new trial should determine whether the fire fighter was a “state actor” when he used the fire truck to stop the suspected impaired driver.
- A unanimous three-judge panel affirmed much of a lower court’s ruling in an inverse condemnation case involving the Cabarrus County town of Midland. While appellate judges agreed with the trial judge that the town did engage in inverse condemnation when its contractors installed a natural gas pipeline and fiber optic line on private property in 2009, the three-judge panel reversed the lower court’s ruling that the damage done to the private property amounted to a regulatory “taking.” The case heads back to the trial court for the determination of damages.
