Last week was crossover deadline at the General Assembly–a major event for lawmakers, legislative staffers, lobbyists and policy wonks. If you don’t fall into any of these categories, the deadline may not have greatly affected your work week. But because crossover marks (at least theoretically) the deadline by which non-revenue bills must pass one chamber of the legislature in order to be considered by the other during the remainder of the session, it is a good time to take stock of pending legislation. A complete listing of bills that met crossover is available here. Several of these bills would significantly amend laws related to impaired driving.
Crimes and Elements
Can the Person Protected by a DVPO Be Charged with Violating the Order?
Here’s a question I get occasionally: What language should I use to charge aiding and abetting a violation of a domestic violence protective order (DVPO)? Here’s a similar one: If someone is arrested for aiding and abetting a violation of a DVPO, is the person subject to the 48-hour pretrial release law for domestic violence offenses? I know the scenario immediately.
We are NOT Ferguson
Being married to me is hard. My husband makes an off-hand comment about how the city must need money since the police are pulling people over left and right for speeding on the road he travels to work. What does he get in response? A lecture on the state’s uniform court system and the fines and forfeitures clause of our state constitution. Thankfully, he is a patient man. He took it so well that I thought I’d share the finer points of that discussion with you.
Does a DWI Conviction Bar a Person from Possessing a Gun?
The maximum punishment for driving while impaired in violation of G.S. 20-138.1 increased from two to three years in 2011. As a result, defendants convicted of misdemeanor DWI and sentenced at the most serious level—Aggravated Level One—are prohibited from possessing firearms by federal law. That’s because federal law prohibits firearm possession by a person who has been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year, though state law misdemeanors that are punishable by a term of imprisonment of two years or less are excluded from this category of disqualifying convictions. Because North Carolina law sets out a single offense of driving while impaired, which may be punished at varying levels, rather than six separate offenses, there is a question as to whether any defendant convicted of misdemeanor DWI on or after December 1, 2011 may lawfully possess a firearm, regardless of the level at which the defendant was actually punished.
BATFE’s Proposed Bullet Ban
Regular readers know that I try to keep abreast of changes in gun laws, both because guns are involved in a significant number of serious crimes and because the gun laws themselves are often criminal provisions. There’s been considerable recent media coverage of a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to change the legal status of a specific type of ammunition. Depending on who you talk to, the move is either a technical reclassification that will improve officer safety at no significant cost to law-abiding gun owners, or President Obama’s first step towards gun control by executive action. As usual for a School of Government piece, this post doesn’t take a side, but does provide some facts.
Offense Date for Habitual Felon Indictments
A recent conversation reminded me about a question I’ve received several times over the years: On a habitual felon indictment, what should be listed as the offense date? The two main choices are (1) the date of the substantive felony with which the defendant is charged, and (2) the date of the last of the defendant’s previous convictions, i.e., the date that the defendant became a habitual felon.
Pattern Jury Instructions Now Available for Free Online
Yesterday, I received the following announcement from a colleague here at the School. I thought that it was worth sharing in its entirety:
The North Carolina Pattern Jury Instructions (PJI) are now available, for free, in PDF Format in an Online Library from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Government. The Pattern Jury Instructions also remain available in hard copy and software formats.
Knives and the Right to Bear Arms
There’s been a great deal of litigation recently about firearms and the Second Amendment. But guns aren’t the only “arms” sometimes carried for self-defense, and there have been several recent cases about the status of knives under the federal Constitution and state constitutions.
The Significance of Naming a Hate Crime
The murder of three young, gifted students in Chapel Hill Tuesday evening has generated a local, national, and international outpouring of grief and outrage. Deah Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19, were shot dead in the Finley Forest condominium where newlyweds Deah and Yusor lived. A neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, fled the area after the shooting, but later turned himself into law enforcement officers. Hicks is charged with first degree murder in their deaths, and is being held without bond in Raleigh’s Central Prison. Police say that the killings were motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute about, of all things, parking. Nevertheless, many, including Yusor and Razan’s father, suspect it also may have been motivated by the fact that the three were Muslims. Yusor regularly wore a headscarf—an outward manifestation of her faith.
Combining Drug Quantities
I’ve recently been asked several variants of this question: If a suspect sells drugs to an undercover officer on multiple occasions over a few days or weeks, can the drug quantities involved in each sale be aggregated to reach the trafficking threshold? That led me to spend some time looking at the more general issue of when multiple caches of drugs can be combined. This post lays out the law.