North Carolina Criminal Law

Most people can get behind the idea that inmates should, if able, do some sort of work during their incarceration. By statute, “[i]t is declared to be the public policy […]

Read post

Before Structured Sentencing we had Fair Sentencing. Under Fair Sentencing, there was no such thing as “prior record level,” but a prior conviction could qualify as an aggravating factor, exposing […]

Read post

Last month, the court of appeals decided State v. Hogan, __ N.C. App. __, 758 S.E.2d 465 (2014), a case about the use of a defendant’s prior convictions from New […]

Read post

I wrote previously (here and here) about the “donut hole” in the probation law regarding absconding. In short, due to a wrinkle in legislative effective dates, persons on probation for […]

Read post

It’s time to post an updated sex offender registration and monitoring flow chart. The new chart is available here. It incorporates the following issues, which were resolved by recent appellate […]

Read post

A recent case from the Supreme Court of North Carolina appears to have relaxed the limits on the use of hearsay at a probation violation hearing. The case also sheds […]

Read post

Entering a sentence is more than a mere recitation of months and years and dollars. A judge has wide latitude to consider all sorts of information at sentencing, and then […]

Read post

When a person’s probation is revoked, his or her suspended sentence is generally activated in the same manner in which it was entered by the sentencing judge. But a lot […]

Read post

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court decided Hall v. Florida, a case about the death penalty and intellectual disability. It’s an important case with implications for North Carolina. Background. In […]

Read post

The county is generally responsible for the cost of emergency medical care for jail inmates. G.S. 153A-224(b). It’s not always clear what constitutes an emergency, but state regulations include things […]

Read post