North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

I was thinking about making today’s post a news roundup, since there’s been so much interesting criminal law news recently, including a rumor suggesting that Justice Patricia Timmons-Goodson could be […]

I am occasionally asked about the adult sentencing consequences of a defendant’s juvenile history. The first-order answer is easy: juvenile adjudications never count toward felony prior record level or misdemeanor […]

Some time ago I prepared a flow chart that included all the information about sex offender registration and monitoring I could reasonably (or maybe even slightly unreasonably) cram onto one […]

I am frequently asked about what convictions may count toward a defendant’s prior record level in prosecutions under the habitual felon law and other similar laws, like habitual impaired driving. […]

One of our loyal readers asked for our take on the provision in the motion for appropriate relief (MAR) statute that allows a defendant to seek relief at any time […]

After Alyson’s post from yesterday, I thought it might be a good time to recap some of the other sentence credit issues our courts have addressed over the years. These […]

Editor’s note: SOG faculty member Alyson Grine — today’s guest blogger — holds the position of Defender Educator. As her title suggests, her principal client group is public defenders and […]

Editor’s note: This post was originally intended to be a response to a comment to a post about sentences of banishment. The initial post, here, considered a federal sentence that […]

A life sentence has not always meant a person’s natural life in North Carolina—probably. Under G.S. 14-2 as it existed for offenses committed after April 8, 1974, but before July […]

G.S. 90-96 is one of the densest, most used, and most misunderstood statutes on the books. Let’s try to unpack it a little bit. There are two distinct subsections under […]