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A divided North Carolina Supreme Court decided State v. Packingham last Friday, upholding the statutory ban on registered sex offenders using social networking websites that allow minors to join. G.S. 14-202.5. The defendant argued that the statute violated his First Amendment rights, but the court ruled that the statute targets conduct, not speech, and that any incidental burden on speech is justifiable. A law professor’s skeptical analysis of the decision is here. Another professor’s suggestion that the case may merit review by the United States Supreme Court is here.

On the first day of elementary school each year, our teacher displayed her paddle, which was wooden with a short, solid handle. The paddle portion had holes drilled through its core.  Most school years, someone (always a boy, in my recollection), wound up being paddled. Times have changed for most students. But because a handful of schools in North Carolina still employ corporal punishment, questions continue to arise regarding when such punishment crosses the line between permissible school discipline and unlawful assault. 

I’ll save you the suspense: Yes. Read on for an explanation.

Today’s post shares a revised chart for determining the proper place of confinement for a criminal conviction. The chart is available here.

Superior Court Judge Arnold Jones, the Chair of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, was arrested this week and charged in federal court with bribery and related offenses. WRAL reports here that the judge allegedly attempted “to bribe an FBI officer [by paying him $100] to collect text messages between two phone numbers in what the judge said was a family matter.”

When a probationer has served three years of a probationary period greater than three years, the probation officer is required to bring the case before the court for a mandatory review. The review has one statutory purpose: to give the court an opportunity to terminate probation early.

This session, the General Assembly amended G.S. 15A-1201, which sets out the procedures for waiving a jury trial in superior court. S.L. 2015-289. This post summarizes the changes.

The General Assembly recently enacted a new “revenge porn” statute. S.L. 2015-250. The law actually gives the offense a tamer name: Disclosure of Private Images. The statute takes effect December 1, 2015, and applies to offenses committed on or after that date. Here’s what you need to know about the new crime.

Just about anyone who was a student at Carolina in 1995 remembers where they were on January 26 of that year when they heard that a gunman carrying a World-War-II-era rifle had opened fire on passersby as he walked down Henderson Street shortly after lunchtime. The shooter was Wendell Williamson, a third-year student at UNC law. He shot and killed two people that afternoon: Ralph Walker, Jr., a 42-year-old Chapel Hill resident, and twenty-year-old Kevin Reichardt, who was a sophomore at UNC and a member of the university’s lacrosse team. Williamson, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was tried for murder. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. What happened next for Williamson is what happens to all criminal defendants acquitted by reason of insanity. He was involuntarily committed to a state mental health hospital, where he will remain until he can demonstrate that he (1) no longer has a mental illness or (2) is no longer dangerous to others. Are defendants like Williamson who are charged with homicide and found not guilty by reason of insanity ever released from state hospitalization?

My family and I went to the State Fair last weekend, the same day as Bobby Joe Snyder, the third registered sex offender to be arrested at the Fair this year. WRAL has the story here. We had a good time, watching some clogging, cheering for the Axe Women Loggers of Maine, and eating fried Oreos.