Articles in the Sentencing category - Page 34 of 64

The General Assembly just made it a whole lot easier to determine whether a defendant imprisoned for a misdemeanor DWI conviction will serve his or her sentence in jail or […]

Some inmates are serving long sentences for older crimes that would receive a much shorter sentence under today’s law. It is clear at this point that they cannot have today’s […]

North Carolina’s first attempt at a presumptive sentencing law was the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA). The law was in effect for offenses committed from July 1, 1981 to September 30, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]