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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]