North Carolina Criminal Law

I recently presented at the North Carolina Probation and Parole Association’s annual conference. I received a lot of really good questions, but the subject that raised the most questions (by […]

Read post

The court of appeals decided two satellite-based monitoring cases last week, State v. May and State v. Cowan. The May case—which primarily orders the correction of a clerical error—reminds us […]

Read post

Every now and then I get a call—usually from a concerned citizen or a prosecutor—asking whether it’s okay for a sex offender to be living in the same residence as […]

Read post

Last Friday, after years of litigation and months of deliberation, the Supreme Court of North Carolina issued its decision in Jones v. Keller. The case resolves the question of what […]

Read post

In 2009 the General Assembly ordered the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Department of Correction to study the feasibility of conducting presentence investigations on “all offenders convicted of […]

Read post

I recently finished a comprehensive update of my Sex Offender Registration and Monitoring Flow Chart. It’s available here. As before, it includes a list of all reportable crimes (with a […]

Read post

In the recently-completed legislative session, the General Assembly passed several new laws regarding sentencing, corrections, and similar subjects. Frequent blog contributor and School of Government faculty member Jamie Markham has […]

Read post

The court of appeals issued three opinions on Tuesday involving satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. In all three, offenders challenged trial court determinations that they had to enroll in […]

Read post

I am sometimes asked if a conviction for which prayer for judgment has been continued (a PJC) can be expunged. It’s a sensible question, given—as I’ll discuss in a moment—that […]

Read post

Back in March I wrote a post on restitution to government agencies, setting out the general rule in G.S. 15A-1340.37(c) that “[n]o government agency shall benefit by way of restitution except for […]

Read post