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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:

• 40.6% of counties[1] exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019; and
• 56.3% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019.

Our report relies on information reported to state authorities. Specifically, the North Carolina Administrative Code requires the sheriff or the administrator of a regional jail to submit a monthly report to the Jail and Detention Section of DHHS’ Division of Health Service Regulation.[2] Police chiefs likewise are required to report monthly on the occupancy of municipal lockups.[3] According to DHHS, those required to report do not include a count of inmates housed in other counties; rather they count only individuals physically present in the facility.[4] A jail that is housing individuals for another county would include those persons in its count.[5] We obtained a compilation of reported data from DHSS and it serves as the basis for this report.

The Charlotte Observer reported this week that a majority of the inmates at Neuse Correctional Institution in Goldsboro and at least eight staff members at the facility have tested positive for the novel coronavirus.  With more than 450 inmates testing positive, the Observer report says that the outbreak at Neuse is among the largest of any prison in the nation.  Keep reading for more on this story and other news.

This post summarizes an opinion issued by the Supreme Court of the United States on April 20, 2020, and opinions issued by the Court of Appeals of North Carolina on April 21, 2020.

After former Chief Justice Mark Martin’s North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice issued its final report recommending that North Carolina embark on bail reform pilot projects, North Carolina Judicial District 30B launched the first such project. Judicial District 30B consists of two rural counties in Western North Carolina: Haywood and Jackson. Among other things, the district is not served by a public defender, has no pretrial services, and in one of the counties caseloads are such that District Court is not held daily. The collaborative pilot project was led by Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Bradley Letts and involved a broad range of stakeholders including the District Attorney, local defense lawyers, District Court judges, magistrates, clerks of court, police chiefs, representatives from the Sheriffs’ departments, and more.

Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court decided State v. Golder, ___ N.C. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___, 2020 WL 1650899 (April 3, 2020). Before that decision, there were somewhat tricky rules about how to preserve appellate review of all issues in a motion to dismiss for insufficiency of the evidence. No more. The Golder decision clarifies that all sufficiency issues are preserved with a properly timed motion to dismiss at trial. This decision overrules a line of cases holding otherwise and simplifies the process of preserving sufficiency issues at trial for defense counsel. Read on for the details.

Last month, the NC Judicial College offered our first criminal legal update via Zoom. Many of you tuned in and said you liked it. So we followed up two weeks later with another. Some of you have said we should make this a thing. We’re not ready to say this is forever just yet, but we like the way things are going. So please join us again this Friday for our third Zoom update in the time of COVID-19. And we will commit right now to offering another criminal legal update on Friday, May 8. Here are the details for joining us this week:

As ABC 11 reports, four inmates at Butner Correctional Institution have died in recent days from COVID-19.  Over last weekend, Charles Richard Rootes, Gary Edward Nixon, and Andre Williams died from complications caused by the virus.  On Monday, another inmate died but his name had not been released publicly at the time of writing.  All of the Butner inmates were being treated in hospitals when they passed away.  On Thursday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 66 inmates and 25 staff members at the prison had tested positive for the virus.

As the struggle to contain the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, including concerns about the possible spread of the virus in jails and prisons, there has been a renewed interest in finding alternatives to sentences that involve extended periods of incarceration. It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that Jamie Markham has written about such alternatives many times over the years. But in light of the current health situation, I thought this would be a good opportunity to revisit some of those topics, collect them together in one post, and try to expand on a few of the suggestions and options.

I should also acknowledge that this post was prompted, at least in part, by the fact that I only recently learned about an unusual type of sentence known as the “Holbrook Holiday.”

Correctional statistics have been in the news as we consider the impact of the coronavirus on our jails, prisons, and supervised populations. This week the Secretary of Public Safety announced a decision to extend the limits of confinement for certain categories of inmates under G.S. 148-4 (the general plan is outlined here). That (in conjunction with the existing moratorium on new entries) caused the prison population to fall throughout the week. Advocates continue to push for broader releases.

But today’s post isn’t about what’s happening now to get certain inmates out of prison. Instead, it’s a review of the last year’s worth of data on how those inmates got there in the first place. The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission recently published its annual Structured Sentencing Statistical Report for Felonies and Misdemeanors. Here are the highlights.

Chief Justice Cheri Beasley entered an order yesterday extending until June 1, 2020 the time and periods of limitations for documents and papers due to be filed and acts due to be done in the trial courts. The Chief Justice previously had extended to April 17, 2020 the deadline for filings, periods of limitation and other acts. She further extended those deadlines based on predictions that late April “may be the apex of the [COVID-19] outbreak in North Carolina.”