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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.”

It is a new year, and there are new rules for determining the term of office for a district court judge appointed to fill a vacancy.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol where American citizens violently assaulted law enforcement officers and injured government property while storming the building in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.  The NewsHour has been running a series of special reports about the attack this week which are available here.  The Greensboro News & Record reports that more than 725 people from across the country have been arrested for participating in the attack and has details about ongoing prosecutions of some North Carolinians.  Keep reading for more news.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Around this time last year, I blogged about the decades-long question surrounding assault in our state: when do multiple physical acts constitute one continuing assault offense and when do they constitute more than one assault offense?

At the time the blog was written, the Court of Appeals had analyzed this issue several times, but the question had never reached our state Supreme Court. The Court has since decided State v. Dew, ___ N.C. ___, 2021-NCSC-124 (Oct. 29, 2021), building on the Court of Appeals’ jurisprudence and offering clarification on the “distinct interruption” approach used in deciding these cases. This post reviews the Court’s decision in Dew and the implications it has on physical assault cases moving forward.

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.