North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

This post summarizes published criminal opinions by the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on October 6, 2020.

WLOS reported this week that the Macon County Sheriff’s Office has been identified as a COVID-19 cluster after multiple employees tested positive for the virus.  In a statement posted to Facebook, the department said that cases in the department ranged from mild to severe.  Public access to the sheriff’s office will be restricted over the next few weeks but the department will continue to provide its regular services.  Keep reading for more news.

This post summarizes opinions issued by the North Carolina Supreme Court on September 25, 2020.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last Friday at her home in Washington at age 87.  Ginsburg served on the Court for 27 years after being nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993.  She previously held a seat on the D.C. Circuit.  Ginsburg spent much of her career litigating gender equality cases, cofounding the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU in the early 1970s.  More recently she had become a cultural icon, widely known for her strenuous workouts and “Notorious R.B.G.” nickname.  Ginsburg famously was close friends with the late Justice Antonin Scalia.  At a ceremony this week, Chief Justice John Roberts described her as “tough, brave, a fighter, a winner” and added that she was “thoughtful, careful, compassionate, and honest.”  Ginsburg will lie in state in the United States Capitol today, the first woman to receive that honor.  Keep reading for more news.

A federal court Consent Order has been entered in the Alamance County bail litigation. The relief granted in that order and the county’s new local bail and first appearance policies hold important lessons for other North Carolina jurisdictions about the constitutional requirements for local bail systems. Put another way, because the agreed-upon relief and procedures in the Alamance case were deemed sufficient to address the constitutional violations alleged, they offer a model for other local bail systems. In this post, I discuss the key changes to the Alamance system.

Two changes in the law have led to a new phenomenon—the need for youth under the age of 18 to satisfy conditions of pretrial release while being confined in a juvenile detention facility. First, the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act (JJRA) raised the age of juvenile court jurisdiction for offenses committed at ages 16 and 17 on or after December 1, 2019. The JJRA includes a broad mandatory transfer provision, requiring that many felony matters shift from juvenile to superior court jurisdiction. G.S. 7B-2200.5(a). When that happens, the rules of criminal procedure (including those governing pretrial release) apply rather than the rules for juvenile cases. Second, Part II of Session Law 2020-83 required that the few minors who continue to be processed as adults in the criminal system from the outset of their cases be held in juvenile detention instead of adult jails. The release of minors subject to criminal rather than juvenile jurisdiction is governed by the usual criminal process for setting and satisfying conditions for pretrial release. Those conditions sometimes require posting a bond. But juvenile detention facilities are not equipped to process bonds. So how does this work? This post will review the circumstances in which a youth confined in juvenile detention may need to post bond, the impediments to doing so, and potential ways to address those problems.

On Tuesday, the city of Louisville announced a settlement agreement in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was killed by police as they served a search warrant at her home in March.  The city agreed to pay Taylor’s family $12 million and to make changes to Louisville Metro Police policy and practice.  The police reforms include mandatory commanding officer review of all search warrants, mandatory EMS/paramedic presence for the execution of all search warrants, and measures to increase officer engagement with the community.  Keep reading or more on this story and other news.

This post summarizes an opinion issued by the North Carolina Court of Appeals on September 15, 2020.

This post summarizes criminal law and related opinions decided during August 2020 by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of welcoming our new colleague Brittany Williams to the School of Government. Today, I have the honor of announcing another colleague’s return to the criminal law fold.  After more than two decades of serving as an administrator at the School – most recently as the School’s Senior Associate Dean — Tom Thornburg has returned to traditional faculty work, where he will focus on magistrates and their needs in the area of criminal law and procedure. Tom will work closely with our colleague Dona Lewandowski, whose work focuses on magistrates’ civil responsibilities.