In a powerful example of how data can expose racial profiling and change legal outcomes, Emancipate NC Senior Counsel Ian Mance recently played a key role in a Wake County criminal case that ended with the dismissal of a serious felony charge.
Mance was called as an expert witness—not as counsel—by a Raleigh defense attorney representing a young Black man who had been arrested after police approached him while he was parked at a restaurant. The officers, both white and on patrol in an ATV, ordered the man to step out of his car without any apparent justification. Instead, the man fled, later facing multiple charges, including Felony Assault on a Government Official, which carried up to 13 years in prison.
With no meaningful plea offer from the state, the defense began exploring a selective enforcement argument: that the man had been racially profiled. That’s when they reached out to Emancipate NC.
Using public data from more than 1,100 traffic stops, Mance and legal interns Jared Smith and Abul Azam uncovered that over two-thirds of the people stopped by these officers were Black, despite the stops occurring mostly in majority-white neighborhoods. Many of the stops were for minor issues like equipment violations, which are widely recognized as tools for racially targeted policing.
Mance provided a sworn affidavit showing the disproportionate impact of the officers’ conduct, backed by data and grounded in precedent from State v. Johnson—a case in which Mance also testified, and which held that race cannot be a factor in initiating police encounters under the North Carolina Constitution.
On the first day of trial, after reviewing Mance’s affidavit and the defense motion to suppress, the judge called the parties into chambers. Shortly after, the State dismissed both the felony charge and a misdemeanor, saving the defendant a full decade in prison.
This outcome shows what’s possible when we shine a light on racial disparities and fight back with data, legal skill, and community support.
Defense attorneys interested in using traffic stop data to support racial profiling claims should contact Ian Mance at ian@emancipatenc.org.
📖 Want to dig deeper into how it all happened?