This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on March 16, 2021. Gabrielle Supak and Christopher Tyner prepared these summaries. As always, they will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to present.
This post summarizes published criminal law and related decisions released by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in February, 2021, which may be of interest to state practitioners. Previous summaries of Fourth Circuit cases are available on the SOG website here.
This post summarizes criminal decisions released by the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday, March 12, 2021.
Chief Justice Paul Newby issued an order on Friday, effective today, extending emergency directives currently in place for an additional thirty days to in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Tomorrow marks a full year of altered court operations, as the first set of COVID-19 emergency directives became effective Monday, March 16, 2020. 
Trial began this week for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for several minutes while arresting him for allegedly using a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. Chauvin is facing Minnesota state murder and manslaughter charges. The trial is drawing significant media attention, with some outlets publishing live updates and planning to livestream the proceedings after jury selection is completed. USA Today reported Thursday that six jurors have been seated and that the state has raised two Batson challenges to defense strikes of Hispanic potential jurors, neither of which have been sustained. Keep reading for more news.
Video of a Salisbury Police Department K9 handler hoisting a police dog, Zuul, by his leash and slamming him into the side of a vehicle during a training exercise made local and national headlines this week and is under review by the department. Salisbury Police Chief Jerry Stokes said at a press conference, which Zuul attended, that an outside agency is reviewing the incident to determine whether the handler’s actions were proper methods of training. Keep reading for more news.
Carolina Public Press reports that Governor Cooper’s administration and the NC NAACP have reached a settlement in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the conditions of confinement in North Carolina prisons during the ongoing pandemic. The report says the settlement provides for the early release of 3,500 people over the next 180 days and notes that the prison population has decreased by about 6,000 people since February of last year. In addition, an anonymous complaint system must be established for incarcerated people to report noncompliance with virus mitigation requirements. Keep reading for more news.
In late 2020 and early 2021, stakeholders in Orange County, North Carolina implemented new bail reform initiatives. The new initiatives build on earlier efforts. Specifically, stakeholders already had funded a county pretrial services program; adopted an empirical risk assessment tool to inform judges’ pretrial decision-making; established a “strike order court,” affording relief from court non-appearances in appropriate cases; instituted pre-arrest diversion with law enforcement support; and established specialized courts to more effectively address the needs of those who enter the criminal justice system because of underlying issues such as poverty, homelessness, substance use, and mental health concerns. Additionally, local police departments and the sheriff’s office had implemented new policing practices, such as citation in lieu of arrest, to promote the county’s pretrial goals. And in 2018, the Orange County Board of County Commissioners approved a resolution supporting the 3DaysCount initiative, a national effort to improve community safety by applying common sense solutions to pretrial justice issues. Notwithstanding these efforts and actions and the statutory mandate that conditions other than secured bond must be imposed unless the judicial official finds certain factors, G.S. 15A-534(b), data showed that secured bonds continued to be the most common condition of pretrial release used in the county, even in misdemeanor cases. Stakeholders also reported concerns that low-risk individuals were being unnecessarily detained pretrial on money bonds they could not pay.
Children in North Carolina can be tried as respondents in delinquency proceedings for their actions beginning at age 6. The inclusion of young children in delinquency jurisdiction, some of whom may be young enough to remain staunch believers in Santa and to eagerly await a visit from the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny, raises significant legal questions in light of their developmental maturity. Those questions include:
Twice over the last few weeks, I have been asked to teach public officials about North Carolina’s courts. In my day-to-day work, I spend a lot of time thinking about what our court officials do in particular cases and the law that governs those choices. I less often consider the structure in which they carry out that work. In preparing to talk about that broader topic, I gathered a few thoughts and, more importantly, links to important resources that I thought readers might find of interest. 