North Carolina Criminal Law

In State v. Bowden, 193 N.C. App. 597 (2008), disc. rev. improvidently allowed, 363 N.C. 621 (2009), and Jones v. Keller, 364 N.C. 249 (2010), our appellate courts considered the […]

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I’ve mentioned the big legislative changes pending in HB 642 (the Justice Reinvestment Act, which was discussed in House Appropriations this morning), but I haven’t written about an important criminal […]

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Last week I wrote about State v. Clark and State v. Brown, the latest cases from the court of appeals on what qualifies as an aggravated offense at a satellite-based […]

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The court of appeals recently decided a few cases involving satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders, so it seemed a good time to write a blog post about it and […]

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I’ve written before about how North Carolina’s law related to sex offender registration has changed over the years in response to federal mandates. In 2006 Congress passed the Adam Walsh […]

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The rules for sentencing a defendant to special probation—a split sentence—are set out in G.S. 15A-1351(a). Under that law, the court can order as part of a probationary sentence that […]

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As most of you probably know, G.S. 90-95(h) sets out special sentencing rules for drug trafficking offenses, including mandatory fines and minimum and maximum sentences that apply regardless of the […]

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Under G.S. 7A-272(c), the district court has jurisdiction to accept a defendant’s plea of guilty or no contest to a Class H or I felony in certain circumstances. The law […]

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According to data from the Division of Community Corrections, 1270 probationers had their probation revoked in December 2010. Of those, 232 revocations were based on new crimes. I’ve written before […]

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North Carolina’s prisons are crowded now, but they were really crowded in the early 1990s. To keep the system functioning, the state ramped up the rules for sentence reduction credit […]

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