A UNC School of Government Blog
Two recent cases—one from the North Carolina Court of Appeals and one from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—resolve questions of sentence administration that I’ve written about in the past. The first case is McDonald v. N.C. Department of Correction, __ N.C. App. __ (March 20, 2012), and it deals with … Read more
The court of appeals issued a new batch of opinions today. They’re available in full here, and Jessie just sent summaries out to the listserv. (If you haven’t joined the listserv for case summaries, you can do so here.) The thing that jumped out at me about today’s cases was that the court found several … Read more
In a blog post here, I wrote about overstating possible punishment and the voluntary nature of a plea. In that post, I discussed the dangers of overstating the possible maximum sentence with respect to consecutive sentences and recent changes to post-release supervision. That post prompted questions about a related issue. Here’s the set up: At … Read more
Yesterday, I noted that the John Edwards jury had been deliberating for nine days. Apparently, nine days was long enough. As the News and Observer notes here, the jurors reported “that they were hopelessly divided on five of the six charges . . . but in unanimous agreement that [Edwards] was not guilty on one … Read more
The John Edwards jury is back today for its ninth day of deliberations. The general feeling seems to be, “what’s taking so long?” This morning, I got to wondering whether nine days is merely really long, or whether it is really, really, spectacularly and historically long. Seems like the former. A few minutes on the … Read more
I wrote here about several types of driver’s license revocations that can result from a person being charged with and convicted of impaired driving under G.S. 20-138.1 as well as about a driver’s ability to obtain a limited driving privilege to mitigate the effects of the revocation that occurs upon conviction. The earlier post omitted … Read more
Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Michigan v. Bryant may have signaled a loosening of that Court’s interpretation of the key term “testimonial” as used in the Crawford confrontation clause analysis, a recent N.C. Court of Appeals decision suggests that our courts aren’t so inclined. Recall that under Crawford, testimonial statements by people who … Read more
I thought that if I delayed this post long enough, I would be able to include something about the John Edwards verdict. But there still isn’t one, so I can only speculate that the jury is attempting to set a world record for longest deliberation. Either that, or they’ve got a heck of a Monopoly … Read more
Under the Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192), for probation violations occurring on or after December 1, 2011, the court may only revoke a person’s probation for a violation of the “commit no criminal offense” condition in G.S. 15A-1343(b)(1) or the new statutory absconding condition in G.S. 15A-1343(b)(3a). The court may revoke probation for other violations … Read more
The jury in the John Edwards case is still deliberating. Although I haven’t followed the case closely, I found very interesting one evidentiary ruling that took place during the trial. Recall that the case concerns almost a million dollars that two of Edwards’ friends provided to pay the expenses of, and to hide, Edwards’ pregnant … Read more