Professor and Senior Scholar Steve Friedland spoke with WFMY News 2 after a grand jury decided not to indict a Davidson County sheriff's detective who killed an 18-year-old man last fall at a High Point funeral.
An Elon Law criminal law expert provided insight into grand juries when he was interviewed on June 3, 2021, for a television news report about a sheriff’s detective not indicted for killing an 18-year-old last year at a funeral service.
Professor and Senior Scholar Steve Friedland spoke with Marissa Tansino of WFMY News 2 in Greensboro for “‘Fair process is essential’ | Law professor breaks down grand jury process.”
The report follows the story of Fred Cox Jr. Cox died when a plainclothes Davidson County sheriff’s detective shot him four times outside a church funeral in High Point, North Carolina, following reports to police of a drive-by shooting at the service.
“If the grand jury refuses to indict that’s really saying to the prosecutor ‘we don’t think there’s enough evidence to go forward,'” Friedland told WFMY.
Friedland is a founding member of the law school faculty. In addition to law teaching, he has served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and as an Assistant Director of the Office of Legal Education in the Department of Justice.
An accomplished scholar who has published articles in several renowned journals, Friedland’s books on Evidence Law, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Procedure and Law School Teaching have been published by the West Publishing Company, Aspen Press, Lexis Publishing Company and Carolina Academic Press.
Friedland was elected to the American Law Institute, served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Law School Admission Council, and is a current member of the Lexis Advisory Board. He has won numerous teaching awards at several law schools over three decades and was named one of the best law teachers in America by the Harvard University Press book, “What the Best Law Teachers Do.”