Category: Uncategorized

The Los Angeles Times reported late Wednesday night that federal law enforcement agents seized North Carolina Senator Richard Burr’s cellphone while serving a search warrant at Burr’s Washington, D.C., residence.  The LA Times report also says that agents served a warrant on Apple in recent days to obtain information from Burr’s iCloud account.  The search warrants come as an investigation intensifies into whether Burr profited off of nonpublic information about the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic by selling significant investment holdings prior to the downturn in the stock market.  On Thursday morning, Burr announced that he would step down as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Keep reading for more news.

This post summarizes published criminal and related decisions of interest from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2020. Previous summaries of Fourth Circuit criminal cases can be found here.

Yesterday afternoon United States Attorney Timothy Shea filed a motion to dismiss criminal charges that the Department of Justice brought against Michael Flynn, the retired Army General who briefly served as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor in early 2017, as part of the special counsel inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  The charges were based on allegations that Flynn misled FBI investigators about conversations he had with a Russian diplomat soon after the election regarding sanctions.  As the New York Times reports, the motion says that the interview where Flynn misled investigators was not “conducted with a legitimate investigative basis” and, for that reason, the government would be unable to prove that Flynn’s false statements were material to an investigation.  Flynn had previously pleaded guilty to the charges.  Keep reading for more news.

This post summarizes opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on May 5, 2020.

John Rubin, Phil Dixon and I will host Legal Updates from the Judicial College this Friday, May 8, 2020, from 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.  We will discuss recent criminal law decisions by the appellate courts. Below are the details for joining this webinar.

This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Supreme Court decided on May 1, 2020.

As the Charlotte Observer reports, yesterday UNC Charlotte marked the one-year anniversary of the campus shooting that claimed the lives of two students on the last day of spring classes.  In a ceremony that was conducted virtually because of the coronavirus, yesterday morning campus police officers placed two wreaths in front of the Kennedy Building, the site of the tragedy, to honor the two students who were killed, Reed Parlier and Riley Howell.  Later, at 5:10pm, the Niner Nation streamed a live event with remarks from the chancellor and other members of the UNCC community.  Keep reading for more news.

Six years ago (almost to the day) the School released its first version of the Structured Sentencing smartphone app. A new web-based version is available today.

Last month I blogged about the one type of delinquency hearing for which remote proceedings are expressly authorized in statute—hearings on continued custody. This blog analyzes the legal and practical considerations for holding other types of delinquency proceedings through the use of audio and video technology. It will provide an overview of the authority to hold other delinquency proceedings remotely, discuss special considerations related to delinquency proceedings, and address what it all means for first appearances, probable cause hearings, transfer hearings, adjudication hearings, and dispositional hearings.

Local jails are an important part of the state’s criminal justice system. Jails house, among others, individuals held pretrial, serving sentences, and held for federal and other authorities. In this report and in the accompanying spreadsheet (here), we provide information about North Carolina jail occupancy rates. Among other things, we find that:

• 40.6% of counties[1] exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019; and
• 56.3% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019.

Our report relies on information reported to state authorities. Specifically, the North Carolina Administrative Code requires the sheriff or the administrator of a regional jail to submit a monthly report to the Jail and Detention Section of DHHS’ Division of Health Service Regulation.[2] Police chiefs likewise are required to report monthly on the occupancy of municipal lockups.[3] According to DHHS, those required to report do not include a count of inmates housed in other counties; rather they count only individuals physically present in the facility.[4] A jail that is housing individuals for another county would include those persons in its count.[5] We obtained a compilation of reported data from DHSS and it serves as the basis for this report.