North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Last Friday, after years of litigation and months of deliberation, the Supreme Court of North Carolina issued its decision in Jones v. Keller. The case resolves the question of what […]

In 2009 the General Assembly ordered the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Department of Correction to study the feasibility of conducting presentence investigations on “all offenders convicted of […]

Earlier posts (here, here, and here) discuss the statutory and constitutional requirements for obtaining a sample of a defendant’s blood for analysis in an implied-consent case.  This post likewise addresses […]

Last week, the court of appeals decided State v. Yencer, ruling, in effect, that Davidson College may not operate its own police department. The ruling calls into serious question the […]

As noted in an earlier post, I get asked a lot of questions about motions for appropriate relief (MARs). One procedural issue that causes some confusion is procedural default. The […]

In previous posts, my colleagues and I have discussed several of the noteworthy bills enacted by the General Assembly in the short session that concluded last month. For example, Jamie […]

The biggest criminal law story this week has to be the ongoing controversy over the SBI. Two independent reviewers examined the work of the Forensic Biology Section of the SBI […]

I blogged here about the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ initial opinion in Lee v. Gore, ___ N.C. App. ___ (January 19, 2010), holding that DMV lacked authority to revoke […]

I recently finished a comprehensive update of my Sex Offender Registration and Monitoring Flow Chart. It’s available here. As before, it includes a list of all reportable crimes (with a […]

Because our appellate courts often find the Fourth Circuit’s opinions to be persuasive authority, I read all the Fourth Circuit’s published criminal cases. Yesterday, the court decided United States v. […]