Latest posts in category Uncategorized on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

This post summarized published criminal and related decisions released by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals during January 2022. Decisions that may be of interest to state practitioners are summarized monthly. Previous Fourth Circuit case summaries are available here. 

As WCYB reports, two men who escaped from the Sullivan County Jail in Tennessee died after a motor vehicle chase across North Carolina ended in a crash in Brunswick County earlier this week.  Escapees Tobias Carr and Timothy Sarver allegedly were involved in a robbery at a convenience store in Onslow County and then were chased across several North Carolina jurisdictions before their vehicle was disabled and crashed.  Precise details of the incident were unavailable at the time of writing.  Keep reading for more news.

Today’s post is a conversation between Jamie Markham (JM) and Kristen Rosselli (KR), Chief Operating Officer at TROSA. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about how TROSA and other substance use disorder treatment programs are operating during the pandemic, so I thought I would go straight to the source to learn more. This post should not be viewed as an endorsement of TROSA in particular—it just happens to be one of the largest programs in the state, and the one about which I get the most inquiries. As always, my goal is to share up-to-date information so you can make informed decisions for the defendants, clients, and cases that come before you.

Emergency response officials and personnel at the state and local level deserve special recognition this week for their handling of the extremely dangerous fire at a fertilizer production facility in Winston-Salem.  As the Winston-Salem Journal reports, a massive fire broke out at the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant on Monday night, prompting emergency responders to go door-to-door to warn residents within one mile of the site to evacuate their homes because of the possibility that roughly 600 tons of ammonium nitrate could explode and devastate the surrounding area.  The threat of an explosion was diminishing at the time of writing.  Keep reading for more news.

State law now requires every law enforcement agency to implement an “early warning system.” What is an early warning system? Do such systems work? And what can small agencies do to comply with the law? Read on to learn more.

Begin reading this post by standing up. Remain standing if you have worked in a position that has required you to interact directly and regularly with members of the public […]

Yesterday Justice Stephen Breyer announced that he will retire from the United States Supreme Court when the court takes its summer recess later this year, assuming that his successor has been confirmed by that time.  As a profile from SCOTUSblog explains, Breyer was nominated to the Supreme Court by former President Bill Clinton in 1994 after serving for 14 years on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.  President Joe Biden made a campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court and said yesterday that he intends to follow through on that commitment by the end of February.  Keep reading for more news.

The AOC recently announced in a press release that Lydia Hoza has been appointed as the first chief public defender in Judicial District 27B, which includes Cleveland and Lincoln counties.  The establishment of the new office was part of the state budget passed late last year.  Hoza, who previously served as an assistant district attorney in Lincoln County, will be responsible for hiring thirteen attorneys and seven support staff who will work out of offices in both counties.

The shooting death of Andrew Walker by an off-duty Cumberland County Sheriff’s Deputy has drawn significant attention this week.  Fayetteville Mayor Mitch Colvin told ABC 11 that in his opinion Cumberland deputy Jeffrey Hash should be charged with a crime for shooting Walker, who Hash said jumped on his truck and ripped off a windshield wiper which Walker then used to beat the windshield as Hash and his family were in the vehicle.  A judge recently authorized the release of body camera footage from officers who responded to the incident.  Keep reading for more news.

As blog readers know, the UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab has been developing a Measuring Justice Dashboard. Last year we released our Dashboard first metrics: Citation v. Arrest and Summons v. Warrant. We recently released a new Dashboard metric: Criminal Charging. In this post I’ll give some highlights of that tool. But in case you want to get right to it, you can access the Dashboard from the Lab’s web page (https://cjil.sog.unc.edu/); from the main page, click on “Measuring Justice.”