Articles in the Uncategorized category - Page 111 of 153

In an odd turn of events for the person known as the “champion of the falsely accused,” WRAL reports that Christine Mumma was accused herself this week by the North Carolina State Bar of violating the Rules of Professional Conduct. Mumma serves as executive director and legal counsel for the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence. The allegations arise from Mumma’s work to free Joseph Sledge, who spent thirty-six years behind bars for the killing of a mother and her daughter in Bladen County in 1976 before he was exonerated last January.

I have been working on a theory of everything . . . for expunctions. It’s a small corner of the criminal justice universe, but a critical one for people with past convictions. The subject can be maddeningly complex, at times a seemingly impenetrable black hole. I have been trying to master the mysteries of our expunction statutes in updating my 2012 Guide to Relief from a Criminal Conviction (which you can find here, but beware of subsequent changes in the law).

Without further physics puns, here’s one of the questions I’ve looked at: Can a person expunge a misdemeanor conviction under G.S. 15A-145.5 for driving while impaired (DWI)? As the statute is currently worded, the answer is yes.

Come on, fellow citizens! Enough with the nudist exhibitionism in residential neighborhoods! According to this local story, a Salisbury man has been arrested and charged with indecent exposure after “sitting in the back yard totally naked . . . less than thirty feet from where [a neighbor’s] teen daughter was riding a horse.” We’ve had several somewhat similar incidents in the state recently, and regular readers may recall the controversy over whether nudity in one’s home or yard that is visible to others qualifies as indecent exposure. (I discussed that issue here.)

A big case was argued this week before the United States Supreme Court. You’ve probably been following it, right?

Durham native Loretta Lynch was confirmed yesterday as the nation’s first female African-American Attorney General. I believe that she is only the second female Attorney General, after Janet Reno. WRAL has the basics here.

Jurisprudence over whether officers may testify about defendants’ horizontal gaze nystagmus (HGN) in impaired driving trials has failed to follow a smooth path. In fact, one could fairly note that more than the defendants’ eyes have jumped all over the place. First, our state supreme court said that testimony from a police officer regarding the results of an HGN test performed by the defendant was inadmissible without the evidence establishing that the HGN test was scientifically reliable. State v. Helms, 348 N.C. 578 (1998). The legislature responded by amending Rule 702 in a manner that, according to the court of appeals, “obviat[ed] the need for the state to prove that the HGN testing method is sufficiently reliable” and permitted law enforcement officers trained in administering the HGN test to testify about the defendant’s performance. State v. Smart, 195 N.C. App. 752 (2009). But forget admissibility for a moment. Does HGN evidence prove anything much anyway? A recent unpublished case from the court of appeals indicates that it does not.

Partisan judicial elections may be returning to North Carolina. House Bill 8, which passed its second reading with a 64-49 vote, mostly along party lines, would make appellate court elections partisan. Trial court elections would remain non-partisan. The News and Observer has the story here.

Around here, the biggest news item this week was the shooting of Walter Scott by North Charleston, South Carolina police officer Michael Slager. Scott, who is black, ran from a traffic stop, perhaps because he was afraid of being jailed for being delinquent on child support payments. It appears that Slager, who is white, gave chase on foot and caught Scott. Some type of scuffle ensued. Slager at least initially claimed that Scott sought to obtain control of his Taser during the struggle. A bystander captured video of the last moments of the scuffle, which ended with Scott breaking free of Slager and running away, apparently unarmed. Slager fired eight shots at Scott’s back as he fled, killing Scott. Slager has been fired from his job and charged with murder. CNN has the story here.

The incident has given a renewed impetus to the push to equip officers with body cameras. At least two bills are pending in the North Carolina General Assembly regarding cameras. The News and Observer discusses both bills in this article. H537 appears to have the better prospects, as it has attracted some Republican support. It would provide $10 million over the next two years to help fund the acquisition of cameras and generally would require all officers in counties with populations over 200,000 to wear cameras and record specified interactions with the public. A News and Observer editorial supporting the bill claims that the bill would cover about 60% of the state’s officers.

Like most states, North Carolina has not substantially implemented the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). (Only 17 states have.) Nevertheless, some portions of the federal law wind up impacting sex offenders in North Carolina. As discussed in previous posts, as a matter of existing state law, a judge may not grant a petition for removal from the sex offender registry if doing so would violate the “federal Jacob Wetterling Act, as amended, and any other standards applicable to the termination of a registration requirement or required to be met as a condition for the receipt of federal funds by the State.” G.S. 14-208.12A(a1)(2). With that requirement in place, federal rules regarding minimum registration period effectively trump the state-law regime allowing a non-lifetime registrant to petition for removal 10 years after the date of initial county registration. The minimum registration periods under federal law are 15 years for so-called “Tier I” offenses (reducible to 10 years in certain circumstances), 25 years for “Tier II” offenses, and life for “Tier III” offenses.

That longwinded introduction brings me to the real purpose of today’s post. To apply the state law referencing federal law correctly, you need to know the tier into which the registrant’s reportable offense would fall. Federal law defines the tiers mostly by reference to federal crimes. In today’s post I will summarize the federal laws and regulations regarding tiering, including all of the relevant definitions of qualifying acts.

Friday is a University holiday, so we’re rounding the news up one day early this week. Despite the short week, there is plenty of criminal law news to report.