North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on December 21, 2021. As always, these summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present.

This is the final post of the year. Thanks to all of our readers for engaging with the blog this year, we hope that everyone has a safe and happy holiday season.

WLOS reports that North Carolina Highway Patrol Trooper Kevin E. Glenn was shot on Tuesday while deploying stop sticks in an effort to end a motor vehicle chase.  Fortunately, Glenn’s injuries, while serious, were not life threatening and he was released from the hospital yesterday.  A Facebook post from the Yancey County Sheriff’s Office says that the suspect, who was not named, shot at officers multiple times, causing them to return fire.  The suspect later was pronounced dead at Blue Ridge Regional Hospital.  Keep reading for more news.

In this earlier blog post, I provided a then-current overview of criminal law and related legislation enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly this legislative session. Since then, there have been a few more bills enacted that affect criminal law, criminal procedure, and motor vehicle law, as well as some amendments to previously enacted bills.

The Detroit Free Press reports that a $100 million federal civil lawsuit has been filed against the Michigan school district where a high school student killed four of his peers and injured several others in a shooting last week.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.

The nation was again confronted with the recurring tragedy of a school shooting when a 15-year-old sophomore at a Michigan high school killed four of his peers and seriously injured seven others.  USA Today says that there have been at least 21 shootings in American schools since August.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.

Interim Report: Judicial District 21 Bail Project

In January 2020, North Carolina’s Twenty-First Judicial District (Forsyth County) implemented a consensus bail reform initiative in the form of a structured decision-making tool for magistrates and judges when making bail decisions. Some key features of the tool include:

• creating a presumption for a condition other than a secured bond for Class 2 and 3 misdemeanors;
• providing screening factors to identify individuals charged with Class 1 and A1 misdemeanors and Class F-I felonies who can safety be released pretrial;
• affording no special presumption or screening for those charged with Class A-E felonies; and
• embedding within the decision-making process the statutory requirement that conditions other than a secured bond must be imposed absent a risk of non-appearance, injury to any person, or interference with the criminal proceeding.

The new decision-making tool was developed by a stakeholder team that included judges, prosecutors, public defenders, clerks, magistrates, law enforcement leaders, and others. One of the working group’s primary goals was to reduce pretrial detentions of individuals who do not pose a pretrial risk but are detained solely due to inability to pay bail. The UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab supported stakeholders in the development and implementation of the new tool and, with support from local stakeholders, is conducting an empirical evaluation of its impact. We recently released a report (here) from the first year of the evaluation. This post summarizes key findings.

This is the third in a series of blogs about the changes contained in Session Law 2021-123. It summarizes the new requirement for court ordered mental health assessments, including a new care review team process.  (see Raise the Age Legislative Changes  and From 6 to 10: New Minimum Age for Juvenile Delinquency and Undisciplined Jurisdiction for previous blogs about the other provisions in S.L. 2021-123).

A steady stream of appellate caselaw,  beginning with  In re E.M., 263 N.C.App. 476 (2019), established that  G.S.7B-2502(c) requires the trial court to refer a juvenile who is adjudicated delinquent to the local management entity (LME) prior to ordering a disposition when there is any amount of evidence that the juvenile has a mental illness. The purpose of the referral is for the LME to conduct an interdisciplinary evaluation and mobilize resources. Beginning with petitions filed on December 1, 2021, this statutory mandate is changing. The court will be required to order mental health assessments under different circumstances and, in some cases, to order a care review team after the assessment is completed.

Last September, Henderson County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Hendrix was killed in the line of duty after being shot while responding to the scene of a car break-in that had escalated to a gun fight.  Earlier this year, the Henderson County Law Enforcement Center was renamed in his honor as the Deputy Ryan P. Hendrix Law Enforcement Center.  WLOS reports that during a ceremony at a Henderson County Commissioner’s meeting on Wednesday, the county presented Hendrix’s parents with his service weapon, an American flag that flew during his funeral, and the Fraternal Order of Police Supreme Sacrifice Medal of Honor.  Keep reading for more news.

As USA Today reports, the defense rested this week in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager from Antioch, Illinois who fatally shot two people and seriously injured a third while acting as a vigilante property guard in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during intense protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake last summer.  Rittenhouse, who has testified and asserted self-defense, faces various charges, including first-degree intentional homicide, the most serious homicide offense in Wisconsin.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.

The UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab recently launched the first version of its new Measuring Justice Dashboard. Here’s some information about our new data visualization tool.