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I wrote last week about the expiration of emergency orders that had temporarily halted clerks from reporting to DMV a person’s failure to appear or to pay monies owed in a Chapter 20 criminal or infraction case.  When DMV receives such a report, it imposes a license revocation pursuant to G.S. 20-24.1, unless the person does one of the following before the revocation goes into effect:

• disposes of the charge;
• demonstrates that he or she is not the person charged with the offense;
• pays the penalty, fine, or costs ordered by the court; or
• demonstrates to the court that his failure to pay the penalty, fine, or costs was not willful and that he is making a good faith effort to pay or that the penalty, fine, or costs should be remitted.

Someone asked me recently about these sanctions for nonappearance and nonpayment — or incentives for appearance and payment — depending upon one’s perspective. How many revocations are imposed for failures to appear and failures to pay? Do other states have similar license revocation schemes? What other ways exist to incentivize appearance and payment?

As the Winston-Salem Journal reports, the death of John Neville at the Forsyth County Detention Center continued to animate calls for justice and accountability in Winston-Salem this week after surveillance video footage of the circumstances surrounding his death was made public.  People gathered in Bailey Park in the city’s downtown for a vigil honoring Neville where they sang songs and listened to remarks from three speakers.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.

What acts qualify as sexual acts? For North Carolina criminal law purposes, it depends on the context.

This post summarizes opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on August 4, 2020.

Yesterday, Mary Pollard began work as just the third Executive Director of the North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS), which began its work two decades ago in 2000. IDS is the statewide agency responsible for overseeing and enhancing legal representation for indigent defendants and others entitled to counsel under North Carolina law. Over the weekend, before she became deluged with her new responsibilities, Mary graciously agreed to do a quick interview with me. Read on to get to know a little more about her.

Among the Chief Justice’s early emergency directives and orders to address court operations in light of the COVID-19 outbreak were extensions for the time for paying monies owed in criminal cases. Those directives, which extended the time for doing certain acts in criminal cases and directed clerks to delay the entry of reports of failures to comply, were extended and modified in subsequent orders. The upshot was that defendants ordered to pay sums that would have resulted in entry of a “failure to comply” and the assessment of additional costs (and, in Chapter 20 cases, a report to DMV that would trigger a license revocation) had until July 31, 2020 to pay monies owed without incurring those consequences. That date passed last Friday, so clerks now are entering failures to comply, assessing the $50 in costs and reporting the entry to DMV in Chapter 20 cases.

A fatal officer involved shooting in Roxboro last Friday has been in the news this week, setting off several days of demonstrations in the city and generating divided opinions about whether the use of deadly force was appropriate in the situation.  As ABC 11 reports, Roxboro police officers responded to a 911 call reporting that a man, later identified as David Brooks Jr., was walking down the street carrying a gun.  Dash camera footage shows that the officers encountered Brooks, who was carrying a shotgun, and ordered him to drop the weapon.  Soon thereafter, an officer shot Brooks once in the chest, possibly after Brooks made a movement with the shotgun.  The SBI now is investigating the incident.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.

In a post last year, here, I discussed some of the issues related to sex offender registration for out-of-state offenses. Among other things, I noted a federal case in which a registrant challenged the constitutionality of North Carolina’s process (or, really, lack of process) for determining whether a conviction from another state is substantially similar to a North Carolina crime requiring registration. A subsequent case prompted a legislative change that is the main subject of today’s post.

Many people assumed that the implementation of raise the age on December 1, 2019 meant the end of confinement of anyone under 18 in a jail. That was not the case. Even under our new legal framework for juvenile jurisdiction, some youth under 18 still have cases that are handled in criminal court from the very beginning. There is currently no legal mechanism to house these youth in a juvenile detention facility instead of a jail. This changes on August 1, 2020, when Part II of Session law 2020-83 takes effect.

Clashes between federal law enforcement agents and protesters in Portland, Oregon, have been major national news this week after reports emerged that, in addition to extensive use of tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets, there have been instances where unidentified federal agents in unmarked vans are arresting and interrogating people and later releasing them without filing criminal charges.  Details about the extent of the alleged practice are hard to come by at the time of this writing, but late last week Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum sued the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Protective Service arguing that the agencies’ actions are unconstitutional and asking for a temporary restraining order.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.