Latest posts in category Procedure on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

One month ago today, a gunman who police say was armed with an AR-15 rifle walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and opened fire, killing 17 people. Today, in schools across the country, including many in North Carolina, students plan to recognize the Parkland victims by walking out of class for 17 minutes. Some participants also plan use the walkout as a platform to advocate for stricter gun control. Debate over the appropriate legislative response to this tragedy has raged—and ranged—over the past several weeks. Some have called for arming teachers.  Others have advocated for barring a person under 21 from purchasing an assault rifle. And last week, an op-ed in the Washington Post advocated a relatively new variety of weapons restriction:  Gun violence restraining orders. 

Expunging criminal record information can be like removing ants from under your refrigerator. Just when you think you’ve eliminated all the ants/information, there’s another trail. That’s how a talented attorney in this field described the process in her article of the same name here. It’s also an apt description for figuring out the legal requirements, procedures, and forms for obtaining an expunction, in North Carolina and elsewhere. Here’s my latest effort, the 2017 Guide to Relief from a Criminal Conviction in North Carolina.

The art of swindling is as old as time, and governments have worked for centuries to combat the practice. Indeed, North Carolina first criminalized the obtaining of property by false pretenses in 1811. In more recent years, the legislature has focused on a set of victims who are especially vulnerable to financial fraud: older adults. Financial exploitation of such a person is its own kind of crime—a crime that may be subject to more severe punishment than other types of fraud and that encompasses a broader array of deceptive behavior. Assets obtained through such fraud may also be frozen or seized pending the resolution of the criminal case to ensure that the victim receives the restitution he or she is owed.

Editor’s note: This is the first blog post by Jonathan Holbrook, who began working with the School of Government last July as our first Prosecutor Educator. Jonathan knows the field, having worked as a prosecutor for nearly 10 years, first in state court with the Wake County District Attorney’s Office, and then in federal court with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  Please welcome him to the School – and to the blog.

I am truly honored to join the staff here at the School of Government, and excited to have this opportunity to help set the course for the new position of Prosecutor Educator. Over time, my role here will likely expand to include more training and advising, similar to the great work Phil Dixon currently does with defense attorneys in his capacity as the Defender Educator. But for now, my primary focus is on a large project related to the Prosecutors’ Trial Manual, which has not been updated since 2012. The manual is one of many works written and maintained by long-time faculty member Bob Farb, who retired from the School of Government last year. Rather than simply update and re-publish the existing manual, the School of Government (in consultation with an advisory committee of veteran prosecutors) is converting that material into a robust and searchable online knowledge base of North Carolina criminal procedure. This new resource will preserve the rich content and extensive research from the current manual, but in a format that is much easier to update, search, and navigate.

One of the benefits of engaging in this top-to-bottom revision of the old manual has been learning and re-learning all the nuts and bolts – and hidden gems – of North Carolina criminal procedure. The rest of this post focuses on an interesting topic that recently caught my eye, and which I think might be surprising to some readers as well.

The Court of Appeals of North Carolina recently decided a case about police obtaining real-time location information from a suspect’s cellular service provider. The case does not address the principal controversy concerning such information. Nonetheless, it provides a good refresher on the issue and marks a good time for an update on the national controversy about this issue.

Risk assessment tools are starting to take root in the criminal justice system. They’re used to make decisions about pretrial release, sentencing, and the level of supervision or custody to which a defendant will be subject. Some of the results are encouraging. For example, Mecklenburg County uses a risk assessment developed by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to help make pretrial release decisions. The pretrial services office there reports that the risk assessment has contributed to “transformational change” in how pretrial justice is administered, with fewer secured bonds being imposed the jail population falling with no harm to public safety. Based in part on Mecklenburg’s success, the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice encouraged the creation of a pilot project that would “implement and assess more broadly . . . an empirically derived pretrial risk assessment tool.”

The court of appeals decided another significant Rodriguez case yesterday, ruling (again) in State v. Reed that the highway patrol trooper who stopped the defendant for speeding on Interstate 95 detained the defendant for longer than necessary to carry out the mission of the stop without reasonable suspicion of other criminal activity.

I’m happy to announce my first indigent defense practice guide, Defense Motions and Notices in Superior Court. As the title implies, it’s a court-ready guide for practitioners about common defense motions in superior court criminal cases at the trial level. While it is primarily written with non-capital felony cases in mind, the information will hopefully be useful to all criminal defense attorneys.

More than a trillion text messages are sent each year in the United States alone. Some of these messages are work-related communications from law enforcement officers to fellow officers, witnesses, prosecutors, and others. Which, if any, of these messages are discoverable? How should officers preserve discoverable messages? Must prosecutors ask for officers’ text messages before providing discovery to the defense? This post begins to address these questions.

This fall is manual season, and I am excited to announce the release of the 2017 edition of the North Carolina Juvenile Defender Manual. Like our other indigent defense manuals, this online manual can be viewed at no charge. If you’re interested in purchasing a soft-bound version of the manual, available later this month, visit this page.