North Carolina Criminal Law

The defendant in State v. Meadows, No. COA24-149 (N.C. Ct. App. May 7, 2025), was convicted of murder based on evidence that he and two other men broke into the […]

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Author’s Note: The Court of Appeals withdrew the State v. Watlington decision—on which this post is partially based—on April 7, 2025 and reissued the decision on April 16, 2025. The […]

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Author’s Note: This post has been modified from its original based on the reissuance of the opinion on April 16, 2025.  Earlier last month, the Court of Appeals decided State […]

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I have been covering developments around the legalization of hemp in North Carolina since 2018. Never did I suspect then that I would still be working on the topic all […]

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The castle doctrine statute, G.S. 14-51.2, provides that it is presumptively reasonable for the lawful occupant of a home or motor vehicle to respond to an intruder with deadly force. […]

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North Carolina is a bilateral conspiracy jurisdiction. Defining conspiracy as a combination of two or more persons to do an unlawful thing means that if the only other participant is […]

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The defendant presented competent evidence tending to show that he was acting in self-defense when he shot Raquan Neal, the Court of Appeals recently said in State v. Myers, No. […]

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Each year the School of Government publishes new and revised pattern jury instructions for civil, criminal, and motor vehicle negligence cases. Those instructions are created and compiled by the North […]

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Singleton was supposed to make things simpler. As previously reported, in that case our Supreme Court attempted to eliminate some “obsolete technicalities” of the common law by abrogating the jurisdictional […]

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In September, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a significant decision affecting the hemp industry on the federal level. There has been an open question for some time regarding […]

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