North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]