North Carolina Criminal Law

Last week, President Trump pardoned Drumstick, a 36-pound turkey. What’s the legal basis for the annual ritual of a president pardoning a turkey? When did the tradition start? And what […]

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As the Los Angeles Times reports, notorious cult leader and convicted murderer Charles Manson died this week of natural causes at the age of 83.  Manson had spent the past […]

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For today’s post, I conducted a short interview with Tom Maher, the executive director of the Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS), the statewide agency in North Carolina that oversees […]

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A California man with connections to North Carolina, Kevin Janson Neal, killed five people and wounded eight others in a shooting spree in Northern California this week.  After killing his […]

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This question in the title of this post came up in a recent class. The specific context involved a domestic violence defendant who was in jail waiting for a judge […]

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For the second time in a month, the leading criminal law news in our country is a staggeringly tragic mass shooting.  The Las Vegas shooting in early October was the […]

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On Tuesday, Sayfullo Saipov killed eight people and injured twelve others by driving a truck down a bike lane in Manhattan in an apparent terror attack.  It has been reported […]

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Inmates do not forfeit the right to practice their religious faith while they are incarcerated. But of course that right is not unlimited. Officers can impose certain restrictions when an […]

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Sometimes it seems lawyers have a Latin phrase for everything: Self-represented litigants? They’re pro se. The thing speaks for itself? Res ipsa loquitur. Volunteer legal work? That’s pro bono to us. […]

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President Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was directing the Department of Health and Human Services to declare the national opioid crisis a public health emergency.  According to a White […]

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