North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

The debate about the criminal justice system increasingly is driven by empirical studies. Phil Dixon wrote thoughtfully last week about a new analysis of 700,000 drug arrests conducted by UNC faculty members outside the School of Government. This article by a Georgia law professor is also attracting attention – it claims to be “the most substantial empirical analysis of misdemeanor case processing to date,” based on “multiple court-record datasets, covering several million cases across eight diverse jurisdictions.” Similarly, in the popular media, this Washington Post article analyzes a huge trove of data to determine the percentage of arrests in each county across the nation that are based on marijuana possession.

I could list many more examples, but the general point is one with which I suspect most readers will agree: that big data is revolutionizing the discussion of criminal justice. This transformation has been unfolding for decades. Drivers include the growth of law and economics and other law and social science approaches, which has fertilized the legal field with social science techniques, and the increasing availability of large datasets, which has made statistical analysis easier. This post offers a few thoughts about the costs and benefits of this new data-focused world.

This week federal prosecutors announced that they have charged 60 people, including 31 doctors, pharmacists, and medical professionals, with various offenses arising from an investigation into illegal opioid distribution and health care fraud.  Last year the Justice Department formed the Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force and dispatched experienced health care fraud attorneys to several federal districts across the country to build cases against “medical professionals [who] behave like drug dealers.”  The charges were brought in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia.  Additional arrests are expected to arise from the investigation.

The News Roundup comes a day early this week as the School is closed tomorrow for a holiday, we’ll be back to blogging on Monday.  Keep reading for more news.

On Wednesday, a ruptured gas line in Durham caused a massive explosion that killed one person and injured 25 others while also completely destroying a building and damaging property nearby.  The Durham Herald Sun reports that nine firefighters were among those injured in the blast as the department was in the process of evacuating people from the area surrounding the ruptured line.  At the time of writing, the precise cause of the rupture and explosion was still being investigated.  Keep reading for more news.

Today is the day! Whether you are a long-time donor or have never given before, we hope you’ll consider supporting the School of Government today for GiveUNC.

This week federal prosecutors announced that they have charged the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Robin Hayes, and a political donor who owns an insurance company, Greg Lindberg, with attempting to bribe State Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey.  Reports say that Lindberg, along with two associates who also have been charged, met with Causey repeatedly to discuss exchanging campaign donations for favorable treatment with respect to a financial examination that was being conducted on one of Lindberg’s businesses.  Hayes allegedly also attempted to persuade Causey on behalf of Lindberg.  Causey reported the scheme and worked with federal authorities during the investigation; he said this week that the case was complex and that more indictments could be forthcoming.  Keep reading for more news.

Intuitively, the answer seems obvious—a clean record should reduce reentry barriers for employment and other opportunities. Yet, data on the impact of expunctions is elusive because, by their nature, expunged records are unavailable to analyze. No longer. A recent study by J.J. Prescott and Sonja B. Starr, law professors and co-directors of the Empirical Legal Studies Center at the University of Michigan, presents the results of a statewide study pursuant to a data-sharing agreement with the State of Michigan.

The Supreme Court decided Bucklew v. Precythe today, rejecting a death row inmate’s challenge to Missouri’s single-drug execution protocol. Challenges to lethal injection are now 0-for-3 in the Supreme Court, but the Court did not foreclose future litigation. To the contrary, it left the door open to further challenges, and so did nothing to break up the litigation logjam that has resulted in a de facto moratorium on executions in North Carolina.

Late last week Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his report on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.  Attorney General William Barr wrote a summary of the report to members of Congress on Sunday, saying that the report has two parts, one focusing on whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government and the other focusing on whether President Trump obstructed justice.  Barr quotes the report as stating that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”  Barr’s summary says that the Special Counsel did not “make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” on the question of obstruction, and quotes the report as stating that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”  Along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Barr said that he had concluded that the evidence in the report is “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”  Keep reading for more news.

This March, you almost need a bracket to keep up with recent personnel changes in the state’s judicial branch. Not only were a handful of new appellate judges elected to office in 2018, but, just in the last month, the governor appointed a new chief justice and announced plans to appoint a sitting court of appeals judge to fill the associate justice seat she vacated. In the same time frame, the General Assembly passed legislation to prevent the departure of a sitting court of appeals judge from reducing the size of that court. Having trouble keeping up? This post will review recent events impacting the composition of the state’s appellate courts and judicial branch leadership and preview potential changes to come.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 (JJDPA) is the central federal law that establishes core requirements for state juvenile justice systems. 34 USC §111. In return for compliance with these core requirements, the statute authorizes federal funding for states to use in their juvenile justice systems. The JJDPA expired in 2007 and was recently reauthorized in the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018. Public Law No 115-385. The reauthorized statute made several significant amendments to the JJDPA. In this blog post I will discuss three of the highlights: a new focus on evidence-based and promising programs and practices, changes in the disproportionate minority contact core requirement, and new requirements regarding identification and treatment of mental health and substance use disorders.