North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Supreme Court of the United States recently granted certiorari in a case originating out of North Carolina. United States v. McNeill, 598 F.3d 161 (4th Cir. 2010), cert. granted, […]

The Department of Correction runs substance abuse treatment programs for probationers and certain parolees: DART-Cherry in Goldsboro for men, and, as of last year, Black Mountain Substance Abuse Treatment Center […]

It is a regular condition of probation for all supervised probationers that they “[r]emain within the jurisdiction of the court unless granted written permission to leave by the court or […]

A trial court is free to consider all kinds of information about a defendant when deciding on a sentence. See State v. Pope, 257 N.C. 326 (1962) (“[I]t would not […]

I am sometimes asked if a defendant convicted of a reportable sex crime can plea bargain his or her way out of the obligation to register. I have also been […]

In 2002, David Hurt pled guilty to second-degree murder. Over the next several years his case bounced back and forth between the trial and appellate courts based on problems with […]