North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Last month the News Roundup noted that a federal judge had vacated Charles Ray Finch’s 1976 state conviction for murder.  That ruling followed the Fourth Circuit’s decision earlier this year that Finch was entitled to a hearing on the merits of an untimely habeas petition because he met the actual innocence standard required to overcome his untimeliness.  The Wilson Times reports that this week the Wilson County District Attorney’s Office formally dismissed the murder charge against Finch and will not retry him.  The article says that Finch now will petition Governor Cooper for a pardon, which, if granted, would entitle him to compensation for the 40 years he spent in prison.  Keep reading for more news.

Late last week the United States Supreme Court decided Flowers v. Mississippi, 588 U.S. ___, ___ S. Ct. ___ (Jun. 21, 2019), holding in the context of a Batson challenge that the trial court committed clear error in concluding that the State’s peremptory strike of a black prospective juror was not motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent.  This post provides a summary of Flowers and also contains links to other School of Government resources discussing Batson.

As the News Roundup noted last week, bills in the General Assembly that would require Sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts are causing some controversy.  The News & Observer reports that the Sheriffs of Mecklenburg, Buncombe, and Wake counties attended a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting this week to express their opposition to House Bill 370, proposed legislation that essentially requires local law enforcement officials to cooperate with ICE and provides a mechanism to remove officials from office for failing or refusing to do so.  This piece from the Daily Advance says that some Sheriffs in other jurisdictions have no problems with the bill.  Keep reading for more news.

A new report evaluates the impact of Mecklenburg County’s bail reforms. Cindy Redcross et al., MDRC Center for Criminal Justice Research, Evaluation of Pretrial Justice System Reforms That Use the Public Safety Assessment: Effects in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (2019) [hereinafter Evaluation]. The big take away? Mecklenburg released more defendants but did not see a significant increase in failures to appear (FTAs) or new criminal charges during the pretrial period. Id. at 2. Read on for details.

For many years, our colleague Jessie Smith prepared summaries of appellate cases and sent them out via the School of Government’s criminal law listserv. Because she is transitioning her work to focus on criminal justice policy, she will not be summarizing cases anymore, but several of us will collaboratively carry on the service. We will continue to send the summaries out using the listserv, and we are also going to post them here on the blog.  Summaries of North Carolina Court of Appeals opinions from June 18, 2019 are provided below.

Last month, the North Carolina Court of Appeals decided State v. Copley, __ N.C. App. __, 2019 WL 1996441 (May 7, 2019), in which a divided panel held that the trial court abused its discretion by overruling the defendant’s objections to the prosecutor’s remarks about race during closing argument. For that reason, the Court vacated the defendant’s first degree murder conviction. This post discusses the law governing when parties in a criminal trial may discuss issues of race, as well as emerging strategies for mitigating the effects of implicit racial bias on decision-makers.

On Wednesday, Craig Stephen Hicks pleaded guilty to murdering Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha in a Chapel Hill home in February 2015; he received three consecutive life sentences.  On a February evening, Hicks angrily confronted the victims at a condo that Barakat and Yusor shared in the same community where Hicks lived.  Under the pretense of furthering an ongoing parking dispute, Hicks almost immediately drew a handgun and fatally shot the victims, each of whom was Muslim.  Barakat was a student at UNC Dental School, where Yusor had recently been accepted as well, and Razan, visiting the couple for dinner, was attending NC State.  Keep reading for more news.

The Gaston Gazette reports that Mark Carver has been granted a new trial after being convicted a decade ago of murdering UNC Charlotte student Ira Yarmolenko.  A superior court judge ruled that Carver received ineffective assistance of counsel during his first trial.  Chris Mumma of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence is representing Carver.  District Attorney Locke Bell has said he will appeal the ruling and conduct a new trial if that appeal is not successful.  Keep reading for more news.

Late last week a federal judge in Raleigh vacated Charles Ray Finch’s 1976 state conviction for murder and ordered that he be released from North Carolina prison after being incarcerated for 43 years for a killing that he did not commit.  Finch is a client of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke Law School and Professor James Coleman Jr., the clinic’s co-director, served as his lead counsel.  When Finch was convicted, he received a mandatory death sentence.  That sentence was commuted to life without parole after the mandatory death penalty statute was held unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Woodson v. North Carolina.  Keep reading for more information about Finch’s case and other news.

Failures to appear in court (FTAs) are expensive and inconvenient. There is wasted preparation and court time, along with cost and inconvenience for witnesses, jurors, defense lawyers, prosecutors and victims. The defendant may be subject to arrest and possibly pretrial incarceration. Additionally, when an order for arrest issues after a FTA, law enforcement officers are tasked with taking the defendant into custody. And the arrest requires additional court time, both for the required initial appearance before a magistrate and any subsequent bond review proceedings.