[Author’s note: State v. Townsend was withdrawn and replaced by a subsequent opinion, available here. The portion of the opinion discussed below was unchanged by the subsequent opinion.] No one gets […]
According to the New York Times, the governor of Missouri is now deploying the National Guard in an “effort[] to quell unrest” resulting from a white police officer’s shooting of […]
This week brought two tidbits of legislative news as the session winds down. First, the General Assembly slightly revised the rules for disposing of weapons seized during criminal investigations, generally […]
In July John Martin, the chief judge of the Court of Appeals, announced his retirement effective August 1st. Given the timing of his decision, state law requires an election in […]
There are almost 7,000 people on post-release supervision in North Carolina today. That’s up from around 2,000 in 2011, before the law was changed to require post-release supervision for all […]
The General Assembly just made it a whole lot easier to determine whether a defendant imprisoned for a misdemeanor DWI conviction will serve his or her sentence in jail or […]
A national, empirical study of defenses found that the defense of entrapment arose in just 0.08% of cases, usually “to little avail.” Stephen G. Valdes, Frequency and Success: An Empirical […]
The headline news this week is that the General Assembly has agreed on a budget, and Governor McCrory has signed it. It is here. Among other provisions, it moves the […]
The first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution are commonly known as the Bill of Rights and were ratified on December 15, 1791. It is remarkable how many of these […]
An amended statute and a recent case improve our understanding of places sex offenders cannot live and go in North Carolina. First, the statute. Under G.S. 14-208.16, a registered sex […]