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The Herald Sun reported this week that Durham and several other cities across the state are moving previously untested rape kits into the evidence analysis process in an effort to clear North Carolina’s significant backlog of untested kits.  Asheville has submitted the most kits for testing, followed closely by Durham and Winston-Salem.  The article says that Attorney General Josh Stein has asked for additional funds for the State Crime Lab to provide more capacity for testing.  Last year, a statewide inventory found that North Carolina had the largest backlog of untested kits in the nation.

We’ll return to blogging on Tuesday following the Memorial Day holiday.  Keep reading for more news. 

On March 15, 2019, the School of Government hosted North Carolina’s first Criminal Justice Summit. At the Summit, national and state experts with broad-ranging ideological perspectives discussed key issues capturing attention in North Carolina and around the nation. They explored how these issues impact justice, public safety and economic prosperity in North Carolina, and whether there is common ground to address them. A broad range of state leaders and stakeholders attended the program, which was presented with support from the Charles Koch Foundation. For those who couldn’t attend, here are some highlights.

A horrifying attack on the Appalachian Trail near the North Carolina state line that left one person dead and another person seriously injured was a major national news story this week.  As the hiking website The Trek reports, Ronald Sanchez was stabbed to death early on Saturday morning as he and another hiker walked away from an area where they had broken camp in order to distance themselves from a man who was threatening them and acting unstable.  That man, James Jordan, now is in custody and has been charged with murder and other crimes.  Reports say that Jordan recently became known to law enforcement after several incidents where he menaced other hikers.  Keep reading for more news.

The American Bar Association published a formal ethics opinion last week advising prosecutors of their duties in plea bargaining with defendants charged with misdemeanor offenses. The opinion is one part scathing indictment of the process for prosecuting petty offenses across the country and one part ethical advice for prosecutors. ­

Just a week after the tragic school shooting in Charlotte at UNCC, a Colorado student was shot dead and eight others were injured in an attack at STEM School Highland Ranch, a high school near Denver.  Two STEM students, Alec McKinney and Devon Erickson, are accused of using handguns to attack their schoolmates in an English class on Tuesday afternoon.  An 18-year-old student, Kendrick Castillo, was killed when he tackled one of the shooters to protect his classmates.  Keep reading for more news.

In North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25 (1970), the United States Supreme Court concluded that it is constitutionally permissible for a defendant who does not admit guilt to enter a plea of guilty. Such a plea, now known as an Alford plea, is constitutional as long as the defendant “voluntarily, knowingly, and understandingly” enters the plea and there is a “strong factual basis” for the plea. The Court left to each state how to handle such pleas—whether to prohibit them, to allow each judge to decide whether to accept them, or to require their acceptance. Which category is North Carolina in?

Tragedy struck North Carolina this week when a 22-year-old man killed two UNC Charlotte students and injured four others in a campus shooting on the last day of classes.  The Charlotte Observer reports that on Tuesday evening a former UNCC student, Trystan Andrew Terrell, used a handgun to attack students in a science and technology course that he had attended at one time.  Riley Howell of Waynesville and Ellis Parlier of Midland lost their lives in the attack; our thoughts are with their families and friends, along with everyone else affected by the shooting.  Keep reading for more news.

Late last week U.S. Attorney General William Barr publicly released a redacted copy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  The full report is more than 400 pages long and is divided into two volumes.  Keep reading for further discussion of the report and for more news.

I have had the pleasure of working here at the School of Government for eight months now. In that time I have gotten some interesting questions about North Carolina’s delinquency laws. Most often, those questions relate to the confidentiality of juvenile court records. When I first read the statute – G.S. 7B-3000 – I thought it was an open and shut case. Unless you are on the list of people allowed access without a court order, access can only be allowed pursuant to a court order. But then the questions started to come in. Who exactly is the juvenile’s attorney under this statute? Can any prosecutor access juvenile records any time? Can a federal court order disclosure of a North Carolina juvenile record? On what basis can courts order release of juvenile records? It turns out that it’s not open and shut at all. Here is what I have learned so far.

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.