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Last year, the Onion (my favorite news satire outfit) ran an article headlined “Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text.” It’s a pretty funny take on modern society’s overreliance […]

According to the News and Observer, the trial of Laurence Lovette begins today in Hillsborough. Lovette is charged with the first-degree murder of Eve Carson, who was, at the time […]

The Structured Sentencing Act permits judges to consolidate convictions for multiple felony offenses entered at the same time or multiple misdemeanor offenses entered in the same session of court and […]

I wrote recently about how the Justice Reinvestment Act changes North Carolina’s existing habitual felon law (you can read that post here). This post examines a new recidivist offender statute […]

According to my teenaged kids, “corpus delicti” sounds like something that will get you in trouble if you write about it on a government-sponsored blog. It is, however, an issue […]

Last night I attended the annual awards banquet of the North Carolina Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section. Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby was presented with the Peter Gilchrist Award, […]

Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State defensive coordinator accused of sexually abusing multiple young boys, gave a telephone interview to NBC’s Bob Costas. You can hear the interview here. (Those […]

The jury need not be unanimous regarding the felony underlying a defendant’s conviction of felony murder. State v. Taylor, 362 N.C. 514 (2008) (the defendant was charged with felony murder, […]

As most readers of this blog know, many people charged in North Carolina with driving while impaired and other implied consent offenses suffer the immediate consequence of having their driver’s […]

As a general rule, some decisions in the course of a criminal trial are made by the defendant and others are made by defense counsel. A defendant decides, for example, […]