Recent Blog Posts Page 22 on North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

A woman was babysitting a child near Great Bend, Kansas, when the child she was watching complained of a monster under the bed. Seeking to assuage the child’s fear, the babysitter checked under the bed only to find a man hiding there. After a tussle with the babysitter, the man left the home and evaded capture until the next day, when local deputies located and arrested him. The man had recently posted bond on charges of threat crimes, domestic violence, and violating a protective order. He is now being held on no bond and is facing burglary, aggravated assault, and child endangerment charges. The AP has the story, here. Read on for more criminal law news.

This post is about the recurring issue of the requirement for a court to make findings of “good cause shown and stated” to preserve its jurisdiction to act on an alleged probation violation after the case has expired. The appellate courts have vacated many probation revocations for a lack of the required findings. The few affirmed cases show how to do things properly. Turns out, it’s not a demanding requirement.

The defendant in State v. Bell, No. 86A02-2 (N.C. March 21, 2025), failed to object to gender-based discrimination during jury selection. Accordingly, the North Carolina Supreme Court concluded that the “defendant’s J.E.B. claim was not preserved for appellate review.” Slip Op. at 2. If the Supreme Court were reviewing a judgment of conviction on direct appeal, this would not be surprising: a defendant’s failure to raise a constitutional issue at trial generally precludes a court’s consideration of the issue on appeal. But the Supreme Court in Bell was instead reviewing the denial of the defendant’s motion for appropriate relief, where the applicability of the preservation rule is less clear. This post considers Bell’s application of that rule to a postconviction motion.

This post summarizes the published criminal opinions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on April 2, 2025. These summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to the present.

On Wednesday, the Michigan Supreme Court held in a 5-1 opinion that the odor of marijuana alone isn’t a sufficient reason for police to conduct a warrantless search of a car. In 2018, the possession and use of small amounts of marijuana by people who are at least 21 years old became legal. However, the law specifies that marijuana cannot be used while operating a vehicle.

In the opinion, Justice Megan Cavanagh notes that “the smell of marijuana might just as likely indicate that the person is in possession of a legal amount of marijuana, recently used marijuana legally, or was simply in the presence of someone else who used marijuana” and that the smell “no longer constitutes probable cause sufficient to support a search for contraband.”

The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) recently published a report addressing “unprecedented challenges” facing juries and jury trials. The report opined that these challenges include both affirmative attacks on juries and jury trials due to unpopular verdicts as well as enervation on the part of the public regarding civil engagement generally and jury service specifically. Follow-on effects are an erosion of public trust in the jury system and jury pools that are less representative of the communities from which they are selected, according to the report’s authors. The report also highlighted the decline in the number of jury trials in criminal and civil cases, which it said meant that younger lawyers gain less trial experience. The authors posited that when those lawyers become trial judges, they are less prepared to oversee jury trials, creating a “feedback loop . . . leading to even fewer trials and greater pressure to settle or plea bargain cases.” The overarching identified concern was that the jury system might become a “marginalized part of the justice system, with fewer people participating and less public trust in the outcomes.” The report went on to identify four critical vulnerabilities related to the future of juries and jury trials and recommended strategies to address them.

Author’s Note: The Court of Appeals withdrew the State v. Watlington decision—on which this post is partially based—on April 7, 2025 and reissued the decision on April 16, 2025. The relevant section of this post has been modified from its original.

It has long been held that the allowable unit of prosecution for an offense is within the discretion of the legislature. See, e.g., Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81 (1955).  When the legislature does not clearly express legislative intent, the court must determine the allowable unit of prosecution. State v. Smith, 323 N.C. 439 (1988).

North Carolina courts have resolved issues related to units of prosecution in some contexts—including kidnapping, possession of firearms, and theft crimes—while there are questions that remain unanswered in other contexts. Some answers are clearer and more direct than others. I previously wrote a bulletin reviewing case law on permissible units of prosecution for certain offenses against the person, possession offenses, and theft offenses. Since then, the courts have specified units of prosecution for a few more offenses. This post provides more insight into those offenses and reviews the rule of lenity in navigating the unresolved.

Author’s Note: This post has been modified from its original based on the reissuance of the opinion on April 16, 2025. 

Earlier last month, the Court of Appeals decided State v. Watlington, COA23-1106, ___ N.C. App. ___ (2025). Among other issues, in its decision the Court addressed an open question: what is the unit of prosecution for a hit and run? May the defendant be charged once for leaving the scene of a crash that causes injury, or instead may a separate charge be issued for each person injured? (Shea Denning wrote about that issue and the framework for analysis in 2014, noting then that the question had not been directly addressed by our appellate courts). We now have an answer: the unit of prosecution is the number of crashes from which the defendant fled, not the number of people injured. Read on for further details.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal regulation requiring, among other things, that those who make or sell “ghost guns” or “gun kits” must mark their products with serial numbers, keep records of their sales, and conduct background checks on buyers. The regulation, first enacted in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives came in response to a sharp increase in the number of unmarked guns being found at crime scenes around the country, from about 1,600 in 2017 to 19,000 in 2021. Gun manufacturers opposed the Biden-era regulation, arguing that multiple gun parts is not a gun. Writing for the majority in Bondi v. VanDerStok, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the ATF was within its authority under the broad language of the 1968 Gun Control Act to enact the regulation, noting that many gun kits are easy to assemble in less than an hour. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, and wrote separately. Read on for more criminal law news.  

Increasingly, public defender offices are bringing social workers in-house. As part of a growing interest in holistic defense, these offices are relying on social workers to assist with the representation of their clients in a variety of ways. Social workers can locate housing, find appropriate treatment for substance use disorder or mental illness, and improve client communication by building trust and sensitivity to clients’ needs. This work may support the presentation of mitigation evidence at sentencing, and beyond that, break cycles of involvement with the criminal justice system.

North Carolina is in the midst of a major, legislatively-funded expansion of its public defender system. The School’s Criminal Justice Innovation Lab is supporting NC Indigent Defense Services by evaluating the implementation of social work positions in public defender offices to learn more about the ways the inter-professional collaboration functions, how social work positions are structured, and common benefits and challenges of using social work staff.

During this work, a question has arisen on several occasions: how should the inter-professional defense team navigate a situation, such as learning of child abuse, where mandatory reporting laws require notification to the local department of social services (DSS) or law enforcement? Should social workers comply with state statutes and follow their own ethical code by making a report? Or does the attorney’s obligation to keep client confidences and provide effective assistance of counsel “trump” the social worker’s duty to report?