North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Many parts of the Justice Reinvestment Act, including most of the changes related to “front-end” sentencing, were made effective for offenses occurring on or after December 1, 2011. It takes […]

Some criminal defendants just want to serve their time. There a variety of reasons for that. Sometimes they are facing active time for another conviction and hope the new sentence […]

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. A recent case from the court of appeals provides a nice opportunity for an update. […]

With new legislation placing more inmates in the county jail—and with budgets continuing to be tight—I’ve been getting a lot of questions about jail fees. I’ve written about them in […]

The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission recently posted online the new felony sentencing grid effective for offenses committed on or after December 1, 2011. The chart is available […]

It’s December 1, and a lot of new laws (the News & Observer counts 35) come into effect today. Among them is the Justice Reinvestment Act—or at least portions of […]

Last year, the Onion (my favorite news satire outfit) ran an article headlined “Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text.” It’s a pretty funny take on modern society’s overreliance […]

The Structured Sentencing Act permits judges to consolidate convictions for multiple felony offenses entered at the same time or multiple misdemeanor offenses entered in the same session of court and […]

I wrote recently about how the Justice Reinvestment Act changes North Carolina’s existing habitual felon law (you can read that post here). This post examines a new recidivist offender statute […]

As part of the Justice Reinvestment project, analysts from the Council of State Governments (CSG) looked at how the habitual felon law is used in North Carolina. In general, the […]