A UNC School of Government Blog
The School of Government and the Conference of District Attorneys co-sponsored Practical Skills for New Prosecutors last week. The five-day course includes 12 hours of Professionalism for New Attorneys requirements, so we spent a lot of time talking about professionalism and ethics. While every attorney should, of course, be familiar with the Rules of Professional Conduct, there are five ethics rules that should be at the top of every prosecutor’s list.
The Durham Herald-Sun reports that the Durham District Attorney’s Office dismissed a murder charge against Alexander Bishop, a Durham teenager who was accused of killing his father in 2018. The dismissal, based on insufficient evidence, follows a trial court ruling last year that search warrants in the case were invalid because an investigator misrepresented evidence when applying for them. Keep reading for more news.
This post summarizes opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on February 4, 2020.
Two recent cases from the Court of Appeals highlight a recurring issue related to money in criminal cases: the requirement to give a defendant notice and an opportunity to be heard before entry of a judgment for attorney fees.
North Carolina’s Impaired Driving Task Force held its first quarterly meeting of 2020 a few weeks ago. Bill Naff, program manager for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), spoke at the meeting about strategies to reduce impaired driving fatalities. You might be surprised to hear about one strategy that was near the top of the list: Get every vehicle occupant to buckle up. 
WRAL reports that Durham police announced yesterday that they recently made an arrest in a sexual assault case that occurred more than four years ago. In November 2015, a woman was attacked and sexually assaulted while walking home from work on the Ellerbe Creek Trail. The WRAL report says that investigators were unable to develop strong leads in the case until last fall, when they submitted DNA from the rape kit for testing. That test connected the DNA to Emanuel Dwayne Burch, whose DNA profile was in a national database. The State Crime Lab then connected the DNA in the kit to a new sample taken from Burch. Keep reading for more news.
Judges, inmates, and others have asked me about the First Step Act, wondering whether it entitles certain defendants to a reduced sentence or an early release from prison. The confusing thing is that there are two First Step Acts—one federal, and one state. The federal First Step Act was signed into law in late 2018. North Carolina’s First Step Act did not become law.
Local jails are an important part of the state’s criminal justice system. Jails house, among others, individuals held pretrial, serving sentences, and held for federal and other authorities. In this report and in the accompanying spreadsheet (here), we provide information about North Carolina jail occupancy rates. Among other things, we find that:
The capacity to transfer a juvenile matter to superior court as a result of the return of an indictment was added to the Juvenile Code as part of the law changes that raised the age of juvenile court jurisdiction. S.L. 2017-57 §16D.4.(e) as amended by S.L. 2019-186 §8.a. Never before had the indictment process been connected to delinquency matters in juvenile court. This new structure requires a finding in the juvenile matter after an indictment has been returned. It raises a range of questions about procedure and confidentiality. This post will review when indictment can be used to trigger the transfer process, highlight what is known and not known about the procedure that must accompany the new use of indictment in delinquency matters, and address the question of confidentiality of an indictment that is used to form the basis of a judicial finding in juvenile court.
