Latest posts in category Uncategorized on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

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 five decades in prison in California for his involvement in a string of murders in the summer of 1969.  The Times story notes that several of Manson’s followers remain in prison; one, Leslie Van Houten, was granted parole in September of this year but California Governor Jerry Brown has yet to decide whether to release her.

With a long holiday weekend upon us, this is the last blog post of the week.  Enjoy the holiday and keep reading for more news.

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 the provision of legal representation for indigent defendants in criminal and other cases. We talk about the recent raise in the rates for private assigned counsel doing high-level felony work, the status of public defense funding in North Carolina, and the importance of a robust system of indigent defense generally. Readers may be aware that I served as a private assigned counsel for many years before coming to work at the School of Government, and it’s a topic near and dear to me. Indigent defense is equally important for court actors and citizens of the state, and I hope you find the interview informative. It runs around 13 minutes, with minor edits for the sake of time and clarity. Click here to watch.

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 wife, Neal drove the streets of Rancho Tehama firing randomly at houses and other structures.  Eventually, Neal approached an elementary school and fired multiple shots into the building.  The sound of the shots caused school officials to lock the building down, preventing Neal from entering the school and likely saving many lives.  Keep reading for more news.

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 to set conditions of release pursuant to the 48 hour rule established in G.S. 15A-534.1. But a similar issue arises whenever a magistrate sets conditions of release for a defendant who is unable to make bond and so remains in pretrial detention. An example of a common condition is that the defendant not contact the alleged victim.

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 deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, and the shooting this week at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people were killed and 20 others injured, is the deadliest shooting by an individual in Texas history. News reports say that roughly half of the victims were children; one family lost members from three generations.  The Dallas Morning News has profiles of the victims here.  Keep reading for more news.

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 that Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, was inspired by Islamic State propaganda videos and closely followed instructions for committing such an attack published in an ISIS magazine last November.  The attack is the deadliest terror attack in New York City since the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.  Keep reading for more news.

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 inmate’s religious practices would conflict with the institution’s legitimate interests in safety, security, and good order. There is a lot of case law about those restrictions, both as a constitutional matter under the First Amendment, and under a federal statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc-1(a)(1)–(2)—which is even more protective of inmates’ rights than the Constitution.

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.

While attorneys have had an English word and Latin phrase to describe this last category, many public attorneys in North Carolina have historically had no mechanism for actually doing it. That’s because, until last July, G.S. 84-2 prohibited district attorneys, public defenders, and others from “engag[ing] in the private practice of law.” A person practices law when he or she provides legal services for another, regardless of whether the person is compensated for the work. See G.S. 84-2.1.

Recent amendments to G.S. 84-2, however, allow some public attorneys who were previously disqualified to carry out certain types of pro bono legal work.

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 House press release, the declaration of a public health emergency allows for expanded access to prescriptions for medicines used for substance abuse and mental health treatment and allows the Department of Health and Human Services to quickly make temporary appointments of specialists who can respond to the emergency.  Keep reading for more news.

It’s been a year since a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window of the Orange County Republican Party headquarters in Hillsborough, causing substantial damage to the building.  The FBI announced Monday that it was offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest in the unsolved case.  Combined with $5,000 rewards offered by the state and the North Carolina Republican Party, the FBI reward brings the total reward money offered to $20,000.  Contact information for the FBI’s Charlotte office is available at the link.  Keep reading for more news.