November 5, 2009
I first encountered North Carolina’s impaired driving sentencing scheme several years ago when I worked as an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of North Carolina. I represented […]
October 29, 2009
Under G.S. 15A-1343(c1), defendants placed on supervised probation must pay a monthly supervision fee of $30, unless exempted by the court. That exemption may only be granted for good cause […]
October 26, 2009
The New York Times published this editorial last week advocating that all people convicted of impaired driving – including first-time offenders – be required to install ignition interlocks in their […]
October 23, 2009
Suppose a defendant is convicted of a crime and the judge wants to (or, in a “C” or “C/I” cell in the sentencing grid, has to) suspend the sentence. Can […]
October 21, 2009
I’ll get to the topic of today’s post in just a moment, but first I wanted to note what I found to be a fascinating little tidbit about the Willingham […]
October 16, 2009
The First Amendment says, in part, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” There are two […]
October 9, 2009
I mentioned earlier that the court of appeals decided two satellite-based monitoring cases this week. I discussed State v. Morrow on Wednesday. Today I’ll cover State v. Stines. In Stines, […]
October 7, 2009
It seems like every batch of new opinions from the court of appeals includes at least one case on satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. Yesterday’s batch had two. State […]
October 2, 2009
Regular readers know the court of appeals has decided a lot of cases recently dealing with satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. Though many issues remain undecided, my sense is […]
September 30, 2009
How long can a defendant be on probation for a single conviction? A. Five years. B. Eight years. C. It depends. The best answer is C. A judge can sentence […]