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67 N.C. App. 759

314 S.E.2d 1

State v. Bragg

Court of Appeals of North Carolina

Decided April 17, 1984

Court of Appeals of North Carolina · decided 1984-04-17

Relies on State v. Lang

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1984-04-17

How this case has been cited

Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently January 2011

7 state decisions

201984199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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WEBB, Judge.

¶1 We believe we are bound by State v. Lang, 309 N.C. 512, 308 S.E. 2d 317 (1983) to reverse. As we read that case, when a person in custody indicates he does not wish to make a statement, the officers may not take an inculpatory statement from him unless the defendant initiates the conversation in which he waives his rights. Lang deals with the waiver of counsel but we believe the principle is the same. In this case, we believe the evidence is undisputed that after the defendant had told the officers he did not want to make a statement, they continued talking to him until he purported to waive his rights. We do not believe there is evidence in the record which will support a finding that the defendant initiated a conversation with the officers after he had told *761 them he did not want to make a statement. For this reason, it was error to admit his confession.

¶2 Reversed and remanded.

Judges WELLS and Whichard concur.
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