Latest posts in category Uncategorized on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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.

WLOS reports that the Buncombe County Farm Bureau is offering a $5,000 reward for information related to four barn fires in the county that may have been intentionally set.  Fires broke out at four barn structures in the western part of the county on Wednesday morning.  One of the barns was 80 years old.  Keep reading for more news.

This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Supreme Court released on October 29, 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.

The North Carolina Judicial College was founded in 2005 to expand the education and training the School of Government has provided for judicial branch officials since the 1930s. Judicial College […]

In lieu of a full News Roundup this week, there’s just one thing we want to let you know about because of an upcoming application deadline – the NC Rural […]

Parts I – IV of Session Law 2021-123 make changes to the statutory structure that raised the age of juvenile jurisdiction to include most offenses committed at ages 16 and 17. The most significant changes relate to new prosecutorial discretion to decline to transfer cases in which the most serious charge is a Class D – Class G felony and the ability to extend the length of jurisdiction when a juvenile is committed to a Youth Development Center (YDC) for a Class A – Class E felony committed at age 16 or 17. The raise the age changes in S.L. 2021-123 are detailed below.