North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

The court of appeals issued opinions today. I haven’t looked at all of them, but State v. Best jumped out at me because it provides an authoritative answer to a […]

One of the goals of the Justice Reinvestment Act is to have more misdemeanants serve their time in the county jail instead of the Department of Correction. I’ll write soon […]

Shea Denning summarized S.L. 2011-191, Laura’s Law, in a prior post. To recap, the law adds a new punishment level for impaired driving sentencing, Aggravated Level One (hereinafter Level A1), […]

I mentioned in my previous post that the Justice Reinvestment Act (JRA) is not the only new legislation that impacts post-release supervision (PRS). This post looks at S.L. 2011-307, which […]

Under existing law, only Class B1 through E felonies get post-release supervision (PRS). They are released from prison “on the date equivalent to [their] maximum imposed prison term less nine […]

I was at a meeting at the Department of Correction yesterday talking about some of the changes made by the Justice Reinvestment Act (JRA, summarized here). One of the big […]

In yesterday’s post, Jeff mentioned Laura’s Law, which increases the maximum punishment for impaired driving.  Today’s post discusses those provisions in more detail. S.L. 2011-191, dubbed Laura’s Law in recognition […]

For a variety of reasons, it is sometimes helpful to know the maximum punishment applicable to a particular type of offense. For instance, when charging a defendant with possession of […]

The Supreme Court of the United States decided Blakely v. Washington in 2004, holding that any fact (other than a prior conviction) that increases a defendant’s sentence beyond the prescribed […]

The Governor signed the Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192 (H 642)) into law last week. It makes substantial changes to the law of sentencing and corrections in North Carolina—easily the […]