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We could soon learn more about what lead police to arrest two Durham men for the murder of UNC Student Body President Eve Carson.
Tomorrow, a judge will rule on whether sealed search warrants should be available to the public.
The Durham Herald-Sun filed a motion that the warrants be unsealed, much to the chagrin of both the prosecution and defense attorneys representing Laurence Lovette and Demario Atwater.
The most intriguing information gleaned from Monday's hearing came from Orange County District Attorney Jim Woodall, who said unsealing the warrants would pose a danger to a pair of informants.
"There's very specific information -- in fact, almost the entire affidavit is information from essentially two confidential informants," said Woodall. "The information provided by those informants has been incredibly reliable in this case. And we think the informants would be -- their safety would be jeopardized by this information, the information contained in these warrants becoming public."
Attorneys for the Durham Herald-Sun say that argument is simply too vague.
"If there is a safety issue, we believe the requirements are, as we argued in court today, that there needs to be proof of that, rather than just an argument in the abstract that there's something that might happen," said attorney John Bussian.
Aside from the safety issue is the idea of Atwater and Lovette getting a fair trial.
Their attorneys contend that if the warrants are released now, it could taint the jury pool.
"The affidavit portion of search warrants quite often contain allegations that have been untested by cross examination or examination of any form whatsoever," said James Williams, who is representing Atwater.
Judge Allen Baddour opted to mull over the situation and says he'll make a ruling tomorrow.
In fact, the only real action Judge Baddour did take was to unseal the original orders that the warrants be sealed.
He said they never should have been kept secret.
Those orders don't say much, except that unsealing the warrants would be detrimental to an ongoing homicide investigation.
That may be important, because the DA says this investigation is not over.
Here's a look at how we got to this point: Eve Carson was found dead on March 5; later that week, 21-year-old Demario Atwater and 17-year-old Laurence Lovette were arrested and charged with murder.
Police believe the motive for Carson's murder was robbery.

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