October 11, 2019
When a defendant has multiple charges adjudicated together in the same hearing or trial, and those charges arose from the same underlying event or transaction, the court should assess costs […]
October 1, 2019
The governor has proclaimed today, October 1, 2019, as Structured Sentencing Day. It has been 25 years since North Carolina’s primary sentencing law for felonies and misdemeanors came into effect. […]
September 13, 2019
The Supreme Court of North Carolina held in State v. Grady, ___ N.C. ___ (2019), that satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders is unconstitutional as applied to any unsupervised person […]
August 30, 2019
Under State v. Morgan, a case recently decided by the Supreme Court of North Carolina, a trial judge can’t act on a probation case after it has expired unless he […]
August 15, 2019
In a previous post I wrote about the complexities of putting people on North Carolina’s sex offender registry for crimes committed in another state—including how a federal court found the […]
August 1, 2019
There are about 25,000 people on North Carolina’s sex offender registry. Over 8,000 of them are registered for crimes committed in other states or in federal court. There are issues.
July 26, 2019
Prior record level calculations would be pretty straightforward—if the law never changed.
July 18, 2019
When can a court arrest judgment in a case? And what does it mean to do so?
July 11, 2019
In United States v. Haymond, 139 S. Ct. 2369 (2019), a divided Supreme Court concluded that a federal statute was unconstitutional to the extent that it exposed the defendant to […]
June 27, 2019
Under G.S. 15A-1340.14(d), when a defendant has more than one prior conviction from a “single superior court during one calendar week,” only the most serious of them counts for prior […]