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WRAL recently reported that “the Johnston County Sheriff’s Office . . . flew a drone over [private] property . . . to locate [stolen construction] equipment.” According to the story, the overflight may have been conducted without a warrant as “[t]here was no . . . warrant on file at the Johnston County Courthouse.” Can they do that?
Just a week after the tragic school shooting in Charlotte at UNCC, a Colorado student was shot dead and eight others were injured in an attack at STEM School Highland Ranch, a high school near Denver. Two STEM students, Alec McKinney and Devon Erickson, are accused of using handguns to attack their schoolmates in an English class on Tuesday afternoon. An 18-year-old student, Kendrick Castillo, was killed when he tackled one of the shooters to protect his classmates. Keep reading for more news.
The national office for the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision (ICAOS) recently published its new Bench Book for Judges. They asked me to pass it along.
In this post, part of a series on bail reform in North Carolina, I highlight reforms that have been implemented in Orange County, North Carolina. My goal in doing so is to provide models and points of contact for jurisdictions interested in these efforts. If you’d like your jurisdiction’s work highlighted here, please reach out to me.
In North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25 (1970), the United States Supreme Court concluded that it is constitutionally permissible for a defendant who does not admit guilt to enter a plea of guilty. Such a plea, now known as an Alford plea, is constitutional as long as the defendant “voluntarily, knowingly, and understandingly” enters the plea and there is a “strong factual basis” for the plea. The Court left to each state how to handle such pleas—whether to prohibit them, to allow each judge to decide whether to accept them, or to require their acceptance. Which category is North Carolina in?
The court of appeals just decided another case on the community caretaking doctrine. It’s the fourth published community caretaking case in the last five years, and there have been a couple of unpublished ones as well. The activity in the appellate division suggests that the doctrine is being invoked much more frequently in the trial courts. This post explains the new case and provides a quick refresher on the older ones.
Tragedy struck North Carolina this week when a 22-year-old man killed two UNC Charlotte students and injured four others in a campus shooting on the last day of classes. The Charlotte Observer reports that on Tuesday evening a former UNCC student, Trystan Andrew Terrell, used a handgun to attack students in a science and technology course that he had attended at one time. Riley Howell of Waynesville and Ellis Parlier of Midland lost their lives in the attack; our thoughts are with their families and friends, along with everyone else affected by the shooting. Keep reading for more news.
The felony and misdemeanor sentencing grids tell us who can get probation. Community Corrections has its own grid that determines how that probation will be carried out.
The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled last week that city parking enforcement officers’ use of chalk to mark the tires of parked vehicles to track how long they have been parked is a Fourth Amendment search. And, on the facts before it, the court held that the city failed to show that the search was reasonable.
WRAL reports that a district court judge told a Johnston County woman not to bring her 3-month-old baby to court. Can a judge do that?