North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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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Y’all may be tired of reading about sentencing in impaired driving cases, particularly if you’ve read this entire bulletin.  But I’m hoping the reader-market will bear a few more sentencing-related […]

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In 2012, a person on supervised probation for an offense that occurred before December 1, 2011 moves to another state without permission. Months later he is arrested there and brought […]

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Under G.S. 15A-1340.14(e), a defendant’s prior out-of-state convictions count by default as Class I felonies if the other jurisdiction classifies them as a felony, or as Class 3 misdemeanors if […]

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A probation violation must be willful. In this prior post I wrote about the burden-shifting process in which the State must prove to the court’s reasonable satisfaction that a violation […]

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I’ve heard folks say that there is criminal law . . . and then there is impaired driving law.  What I think they mean is that while impaired driving is, […]

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For the past few years, the Section of Community Corrections of the Division of Adult Correction has been transitioning to what they call "evidence-based practices," or EBP. The basic idea is to use series of assessment tools to identify which offenders are mostly likely to reoffend and most in need of programming, and then tailor their supervision accordingly. The process involves some terminology that is probably familiar by now to most probation officers, but may be less familiar to judges, lawyers, and defendants. Today’s post provides an overview of the process probation officers use to sort probationers into different supervision levels and an introduction into what those levels mean for probationers as a practical matter.

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