North Carolina Criminal Law

It’s December 1, and a lot of new laws (the News & Observer counts 35) come into effect today. Among them is the Justice Reinvestment Act—or at least portions of […]

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Criminal defendants, especially those sentenced to long prison terms, sometimes try to attack their convictions and sentences by claiming that their trial lawyers provided ineffective assistance of counsel. The state […]

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Last year, the Onion (my favorite news satire outfit) ran an article headlined “Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text.” It’s a pretty funny take on modern society’s overreliance […]

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According to the News and Observer, the trial of Laurence Lovette begins today in Hillsborough. Lovette is charged with the first-degree murder of Eve Carson, who was, at the time […]

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According to my teenaged kids, “corpus delicti” sounds like something that will get you in trouble if you write about it on a government-sponsored blog. It is, however, an issue […]

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As a general rule, some decisions in the course of a criminal trial are made by the defendant and others are made by defense counsel. A defendant decides, for example, […]

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Former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexually assaulting eight young boys between 1994 and 2009. The principal New York Times story is here. ESPN’s coverage […]

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As blog readers well know, the new Crawford confrontation clause rule provides that absent an exception or a waiver of rights, testimonial hearsay statements of a declarant who does not […]

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As I mentioned in a prior post, the Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192) creates a new set of “community and intermediate probation conditions” that can be ordered in any Structured […]

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On Halloween, I was dressed up as a sheep, trick or treating with my daughter, Little Bo Peep. Fortunately, serious legal business was being conducted elsewhere: the Supreme Court heard […]

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