North Carolina Criminal Law

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 […]

Read post

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 […]

Read post

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 […]

Read post

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, […]

Read post

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 […]

Read post

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 […]

Read post

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 […]

Read post

Defendants are generally pretty happy to get a PJC. When a judge continues prayer for judgment the defendant avoids punishment and is often able to sidestep a car insurance rate […]

Read post

Last week the court of appeals decided State v. Wagoner, its latest case involving satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. Mr. Wagoner, who had previously been convicted of multiple reportable […]

Read post

After my earlier post about nonstatutory aggravating factors, a reader took me up on my offer to write about nonstatutory mitigating factors. In addition to the twenty mitigating factors spelled […]

Read post