Chances are you’ve heard of CBD products. Many cities around North Carolina have stores specializing in CBD products, and it’s widely available online and in ‘vape’ shops. It’s marketed for its health benefits and is touted as a safe and legal (if largely unregulated) treatment for a variety of conditions, from depression to inflammation to cancer and acne. I was recently asked to look at the law surrounding CBD products, and this post summarizes what I found.
Crimes and Elements
Purple Paint and Trespass
I’ve been asked a few times about the meaning of purple bars painted on trees. At a recent class, someone showed me the relevant statute, which led me to learn a little more about it. This post lays out what I know.
A Different Approach to “Collateral” Consequences of a Conviction
In recent years North Carolina has made several reforms in the field of collateral consequences, expanding opportunities for expunctions of convictions, authorizing courts to issue certificates of relief to limit collateral consequences, and requiring that licensing agencies consider whether a nexus exists between applicants’ criminal conduct and their prospective duties, among other factors. See G.S. 93B-8.1. The changes are helpful but incremental. Our most recent criminal justice class challenged the extensive reliance on collateral consequences in the U.S., the effectiveness of current remedies, and ultimately barriers to reintegration into society of people who have previously been convicted of a crime.
Not-Quite-Defective Indictments
Ordinarily, a pleading that fails to accurately allege every element of the offense is defective and is treated as a jurisdictional nullity. See, e.g., G.S. 15A-924(a)(5) (“as a prerequisite to its validity, an indictment must allege every essential element of the criminal offense it purports to charge”); State v. Harris, 219 N.C. App. 590 (2012) (indictment is invalid and confers no jurisdiction on the trial court if it “fails to state some essential and necessary element of the offense”).
The limited exception to this rule is the somewhat relaxed pleading standard for a citation, which may still be sufficient even if it fails to state every element, as long as it reasonably identifies the crime charged. Shea Denning and Jeff Welty covered that issue in a series of posts available here, here, and here.
Several recent cases from the Court of Appeals have offered a good reminder about another important corollary to the general rule for pleadings: although an indictment must “allege every element” in order to be valid, the state has quite a bit of flexibility in how that standard can be met.
Would Daniel M’Naughten Have Satisfied the M’Naughten Test for Insanity?
In February 1843, Daniel M’Naughten was tried in London for the murder of Edward Drummond, the private secretary to Prime Minister Robert Peel. M’Naughten was laboring under the delusion that Prime Minister Peel was part of a system that was persecuting him. Only by shooting Peel could he end the torment. Drummond became the victim of these delusions when M’Naughten mistook him for Peel. The trial of M’Naughten, the verdict of insanity, and the aftermath made legal history.
New Crime Covers Threats of Mass Violence at School
Schools across the country experienced a “dramatic uptick” in threats of school-related violence following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February 2018. One set of researchers reported that in the thirty days after the Parkland shooting, threats and incidents of violence in schools nationally increased by more than 300 percent–from an average of 13.2 threats and incidents per day to 59.4 per day. The national trend played out in North Carolina as well, with schools in several North Carolina counties responding to several reported threats of violence in the weeks following the Parkland massacre. When such threats were made, it wasn’t always clear whether they amounted to a crime. The actions often were a poor fit for the two most obvious candidates: communicating threats (because the threat was not always communicated to the person threatened) and making a false report concerning mass violence on educational property (because it wasn’t always clear that the person who made the threat had made a report that the person knew to be false).
The General Assembly responded last June to this gap in the criminal code by enacting a new crime, communicating a threat of mass violence on educational property, effective for offenses committed on or after December 1, 2018.
New Criminal Offenses and New Credit Policies for Prisoners
Last year was a difficult one for North Carolina’s prison system. One correctional officer was killed by an inmate at Bertie Correctional Institution. Four staff members were killed during an attempted escape at Pasquotank. Today’s post summarizes some of the statutory and regulatory changes made in response to those incidents.
State v. Osborne: Another Wrinkle in Drug ID
Back in February, I blogged about State v. Bridges, ___ N.C. App. ___, 810 S.E.2d 365 (Feb. 6, 2018), and drug identification. In short, Bridges held that the defendant’s out-of-court admission to an officer that a substance was “meth” was sufficient to meet the State’s burden of proving the identity of the substance, at least where the defendant failed to object to the testimony. This decision arguably signified an expansion of the Nabors exception to the Ward rule that a chemical analysis is generally required to establish drug identity (subject to other exceptions covered in the post). For a more thorough review of the topic, see that previous post. The Court of Appeals recently decided another drug ID case, State v. Osborne, ___ N.C. App. ___ (October 2, 2018), adding a new wrinkle to the rules.
NC Supreme Court Broadens Coverage of “Maintaining a Dwelling”
G.S. 90-108(a)(7) makes it a crime to maintain a store, dwelling, vehicle, boat, or other place for the use, storage, or sale of controlled substances. My NC Crimes book states the elements of the offense:
A person guilty of this offense
(1) knowingly
(2) keeps or maintains
(3) a store, shop, warehouse, dwelling house, building, vehicle, boat, aircraft, or other place
(4) (a) being resorted to by persons unlawfully using controlled substances
(b) being used for unlawfully keeping or selling controlled substances.
What We Can Learn from Jack the Ripper
The murders in London in 1888, attributed to Jack the Ripper, were bloody and bizarre. The Ripper tour the students and I took, graphically narrated by our guide, was stomach turning. The murders involved not only the slashing of several women’s throats but also the removal of their internal organs, including their uteruses. These grisly murders drew widespread public attention (and continue to fascinate people today). Why were such horrific crimes the subject of so much interest?