North Carolina Criminal Law

After a grand jury returns a true bill of indictment, should an order for arrest (OFA) issue as a matter of course? Looking at the OFA form, you might think […]

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Regular readers know the court of appeals has decided a lot of cases recently dealing with satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. Though many issues remain undecided, my sense is […]

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How long can a defendant be on probation for a single conviction? A.      Five years. B.      Eight years. C.      It depends. The best answer is C. A judge can sentence […]

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Like many lawyers, I served on a law review when I was a law student. It was a good experience: I became intimately familiar with the rules of legal citation, […]

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My colleague Michael Crowell recently published a paper on judicial recusal, available here as a free download. It includes a discussion of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Caperton v. […]

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Back in July the court of appeals decided State v. Hubbard, a probation revocation case that I mentioned in passing but never really discussed in depth. In Hubbard the defendant’s […]

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Further Update: See Shea Denning’s post here about State v. Mumford, in which the court of appeals held that “logically inconsistent and legally contradictory” verdicts cannot stand. It has the […]

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Melendez-Diaz v. Massachussetts, as most readers of this blog know, is the United States Supreme Court’s latest pronouncement on the Confrontation Clause. Generally, it holds that forensic laboratory reports — […]

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Last week the court of appeals decided State v. Wagoner, its latest case involving satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. Mr. Wagoner, who had previously been convicted of multiple reportable […]

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I’m working on revising Arrest Warrant and Indictment Forms, a manual that provides charging language for several hundred common offenses. In the course of working on language for possession of […]

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