What can a jail do when an inmate becomes unmanageably dangerous, or unmanageably vulnerable, or unmanageably sick? Or what about when so many people are arrested at once that the jail cannot house them all? In those situations, the jail may seek to have the inmate transferred to the state prison system through a safekeeping order.
Jamie Markham
Extending Probation After Expiration
If a judge extends a defendant’s probation after probation has already expired, when does the extension begin?
Improper Equipment Fee Is Punitive, Must Go to Schools
The Statewide Misdemeanant Confinement Program took a hit this week in the court of appeals. In Richmond County Board of Education v. Cowell, about half of the money that comes into the program fund—the $50 fee for anyone found responsible for an improper equipment violation—was deemed to be punitive. Under the North Carolina Constitution, the money must therefore go to the public schools.
New Jail Credit Rules Signed Into Law
Two revisions to North Carolina’s primary jail credit statute, G.S. 15-196.1, will kick in on December 1, 2015. Both of them benefit defendants.
Deferred Prosecutions and Guilty Pleas
Local procedures vary when it comes to deferred prosecutions. In general, there’s nothing wrong with that; the district attorney has broad discretion in the deferred prosecution realm. Lately, though, several people have asked me a particular question related to deferred prosecution procedure: Does the defendant actually plead guilty when the deferral is entered?
Sentencing Whiteboard: Active Sentences for DWI
Do DWI sentences really get cut in half? Can DWI inmates be paroled? What happens when the minimum and maximum sentence for a DWI are the same? These questions and more are answered in today’s video post.
Habitual Habituals
North Carolina has a lot of habitual offender laws: habitual felon, violent habitual felon, armed habitual felon, habitual breaking and entering, habitual impaired driving, and habitual misdemeanor assault. A question that comes up is the extent to which these laws may permissibly interact with one another. Today’s post considers a few of the combinations I get asked about from time to time.
Writs for Incarcerated Defendants: Who Drives?
Sometimes a person who is already incarcerated for one crime needs to be prosecuted for another crime. A surprisingly common question, usually from a sheriff’s office, is who is responsible for getting the defendant-inmate to trial? The county that wants the inmate (the requesting county)? Or the county that has the inmate (the custodial county)?
How to Say a Sentence
At a recent conference, a judge confessed to me that he and his fellow judges drive the clerks crazy because they all pronounce judgment differently. They use different words to order the same things. That’s fine to a point—this isn’t Hogwarts, and a sentence is not a magic spell. (If it were, and you wanted to punish somebody by, say, placing them in a full body-bind, obviously you’d just say petrificus totalus and that would be that.)
For us Muggles here in North Carolina, I thought it might be useful to offer some standard language that a judge might use to order the most common types of sentences. These are just suggestions, drawn from the General Statutes and the language used on the boilerplate judgment forms.