A UNC School of Government Blog
In 2007, the General Assembly enacted the Eyewitness Identification Reform Act, G.S. 15A-284.50 et seq. The heart of the Act is G.S. 15A-284.52, which lays out rules for conducting lineups, whether live, i.e., involving the actual suspect and several other fillers, or by photo array, i.e., involving a picture of the suspect and several other … Read more
Update: I spent some time over the weekend thinking about this case. It seems to me that one likely upshot of Harbison is that some states that currently provide for the appointment of counsel at the clemency stage will stop doing so. After all, why spend scarce state funds to provide for something that the … Read more
After Alyson’s post from yesterday, I thought it might be a good time to recap some of the other sentence credit issues our courts have addressed over the years. These decisions are grounded in G.S. 15-196.1, which requires credit for the “total amount of time a defendant has spent, committed to or in confinement in … Read more
Editor’s note: SOG faculty member Alyson Grine — today’s guest blogger — holds the position of Defender Educator. As her title suggests, her principal client group is public defenders and court-appointed lawyers, but she frequently addresses issues of concern to all participants in the criminal justice system. Assistant Public Defender “Tom” from eastern North Carolina … Read more
Several newsworthy items have cropped up lately, so I wanted to take a day to highlight some of them. First and foremost, the News and Observer has a troubling front-page story, here, about the SBI’s investigation into allegedly fraudulent dismissals of DWI cases in Johnston County. Not the sort of publicity the court system needs. … Read more
Editor’s note: This post was originally intended to be a response to a comment to a post about sentences of banishment. The initial post, here, considered a federal sentence that forbade the defendants from a particular county during their supervised release, and concluded that North Carolina courts lack the power to impose a similar sentence. … Read more
Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court decided State v. Miller, an interesting and very, very close constructive possession case. Prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges should all be aware of it. The short version of the facts is as follows: Winston-Salem police obtained a search warrant for a house based on suspicion of drug activity. … Read more
A life sentence has not always meant a person’s natural life in North Carolina—probably. Under G.S. 14-2 as it existed for offenses committed after April 8, 1974, but before July 1, 1978, a “sentence of life imprisonment shall be considered as a sentence of imprisonment for a term of 80 years in the State’s prison.” … Read more
Update: I knew it. One reader emailed me to say that our appellate courts have approved truncated jury instructions for at least thirty years, and referred me to State v. Gainey, 355 N.C. 72 (2002), which collects some cases and states that the court “has discouraged needless repetition” during jury instructions. Original Post: One of … Read more
G.S. 90-96 is one of the densest, most used, and most misunderstood statutes on the books. Let’s try to unpack it a little bit. There are two distinct subsections under which cases may fall — subsections (a) and (a1) — and the two subsections are different in scope and in effect. We’ll start with subsection … Read more