North Carolina Criminal Law

Over the weekend we observed Veterans Day. Thank you to all who have served. [Editor’s note: Jamie is himself an Air Force veteran, as he mentions below, so thanks to […]

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Recent changes to G.S. 7A-304 (discussed in my previous post) make it more likely that a judge will impose court costs on a defendant who receives an active sentence. Costs […]

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Following up on Jeff’s post yesterday about court costs and traffic citations, today’s post is about a trial judge’s authority to waive court costs. Under G.S. 7A-304, certain court costs […]

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Questions related to the Justice Reinvestment Act keep flooding in. Lots of them have been addressed elsewhere on this blog (see our Justice Reinvestment Resource Page for a collection of […]

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Some probationers are subject to a curfew—a time each day (usually in the evening or at night) when they are restricted to their residence. Recent changes to the law have […]

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Former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was sentenced yesterday to 30 to 60 years in prison on 45 counts of sexually abusing boys. The New York Times has the […]

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The Justice Reinvestment Act created a new early release program called Advanced Supervised Release (ASR). In short, the law allows certain prison inmates to get out of prison early if […]

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Under the Justice Reinvestment Act, a probation officer may, through delegated authority, impose a short period of jail confinement in response to a violation of a court-imposed probation condition. The […]

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North Carolina’s structured sentencing grid did not change from 1995 to 2009. Since then it has changed twice, once for offenses committed on or after December 1, 2009 (discussed here), […]

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A frequently asked question of late is whether a judge may still impose special probation (a split sentence) in a probation case. Apparently the question arises out of a sense […]

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