North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

As the New York Times reports, the major criminal law news of the week was the sudden withdrawal of four federal prosecutors from Roger Stone’s criminal case after senior Justice Department officials intervened to recommend a sentence that was more lenient than what had been recommended by the prosecution team.  Stone was convicted by a Washington, D.C., jury of seven criminal offenses late last year, including five counts of lying to congress, one count of witness tampering, and one count of obstruction.  Keep reading for more news.

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The School of Government and the Conference of District Attorneys co-sponsored Practical Skills for New Prosecutors last week. The five-day course includes 12 hours of Professionalism for New Attorneys requirements, so we spent a lot of time talking about professionalism and ethics. While every attorney should, of course, be familiar with the Rules of Professional Conduct, there are five ethics rules that should be at the top of every prosecutor’s list.

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The Durham Herald-Sun reports that the Durham District Attorney’s Office dismissed a murder charge against Alexander Bishop, a Durham teenager who was accused of killing his father in 2018.  The dismissal, based on insufficient evidence, follows a trial court ruling last year that search warrants in the case were invalid because an investigator misrepresented evidence when applying for them.  Keep reading for more news.

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This post summarizes opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on February 4, 2020.

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Two recent cases from the Court of Appeals highlight a recurring issue related to money in criminal cases: the requirement to give a defendant notice and an opportunity to be heard before entry of a judgment for attorney fees.

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This post summarizes criminal and related decisions published by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in January, 2020. Decisions of interest to state practitioners will be posted on a monthly basis. Previous Fourth Circuit case summaries are available here.

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WRAL reports that Durham police announced yesterday that they recently made an arrest in a sexual assault case that occurred more than four years ago.  In November 2015, a woman was attacked and sexually assaulted while walking home from work on the Ellerbe Creek Trail.  The WRAL report says that investigators were unable to develop strong leads in the case until last fall, when they submitted DNA from the rape kit for testing.  That test connected the DNA to Emanuel Dwayne Burch, whose DNA profile was in a national database.  The State Crime Lab then connected the DNA in the kit to a new sample taken from Burch.  Keep reading for more news.

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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:

• 50% of counties exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2018; and
• 64% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2018.

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When a person suspected of driving while impaired is involved in a crash and receives medical treatment, the State may wish to obtain the person’s medical records for use in criminal prosecution. What standards and procedures govern the disclosure of such records?

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On Tuesday, officials in Winston-Salem held a press conference announcing coordinated efforts to deter gun violence in the city.  As the Winston-Salem Journal reports, there were more homicides in Winston in 2019 than in any other year in the past quarter century.  Chief of Police Catrina Thompson, Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough, District Attorney Jim O’Neal, U.S. Attorney Matt Martin, Mayor Allen Joines, and Councilman James Taylor all spoke at the press conference, with Thompson saying that they would “use every one of the resources [they] have” to pursue individuals involved in violent crime.  Keep reading for more information about the efforts in Winston and other criminal law news.

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