Articles on Sentencing - Page 14 of 63

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to participate in a national roundtable, sponsored by the American Law Institute and National Conference of State Legislatures, on current and possible approaches to relieving the consequences of a criminal conviction. We considered three basic approaches: “forgetting” convictions by expunging them or limiting access to information about them; “forgiving” convictions through, among other things, certificates of relief, also known as certificates of rehabilitation; and “forgoing” convictions by diverting matters before conviction or decriminalizing them altogether. In its recently-completed legislative session, the North Carolina General Assembly expanded the forgiveness approach by making it easier to get a certificate of relief. Read on for more about this relatively new relief mechanism. If you’re interested in approaches elsewhere, the papers submitted by the various scholars and practitioners invited to the roundtable were recently published in the Federal Sentencing Reporter, available here. You can read my paper about North Carolina here.

In my last post, I wrote about when the court should and must consider a defendant’s ability to pay a monetary obligation. Today’s post talks about some of the specific factors the court might consider in evaluating a person’s ability to pay.

Today’s post considers when a court should—and sometimes must—evaluate a defendant’s ability to pay a monetary obligation in a criminal case.

Do the Justice Reinvestment Act’s limitations on a judge’s authority to revoke probation apply in deferred prosecution and conditional discharge cases? Defendants can be placed on probation as part of […]

Judges can continue prayer for judgment in any case. Except when they can’t.

Sentence credits are the days of credit the prison system can award to inmates as an incentive for good behavior, work, or participation in programs in prison. The main sentence reduction credit for sentences imposed under Structured Sentencing is earned time. Earned time reduces an inmate’s maximum sentence, hastening his or her release from prison to post-release supervision. Can it also reduce the person’s term of post-release supervision?

In Grady v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 1368 (2015), the Supreme Court held that North Carolina’s satellite-based monitoring regime for sex offenders is a search, but left it to North Carolina’s courts to decide whether it is an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. We got an answer for one defendant this week, as Torrey Grady’s case circled back through the court of appeals.

Laboratory expenses for analysis of controlled substances used to be ordered as restitution. Since 2002, they have been a court cost. There is a difference.

The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission recently released its biennial Correctional Program Evaluation—known better as the Recidivism Report. The report, prepared in conjunction with the Division of Adult Correction and Juvenile Justice, is available here. It covers defendants placed on probation or released from prison in Fiscal Year 2015.

For felony sentencing, a defendant’s criminal history is scored as a “prior record level.” The analogous measure for misdemeanor sentencing is “prior conviction level.” There are important differences between the two measures.