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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 […]

One of the services that we offer here at the School of Government is what I like to call the “hotline.” When you have a question about the law, you […]

The First Circuit recently upheld a district court’s imposition of a special condition of supervised release banning two convicted drug dealers from Suffolk County, Massachusetts (basically, Boston) during the entirety […]

Can the state compel a suspect to provide access to encrypted files on the suspect’s computer?  For example, if the police suspect that I’m running a Ponzi scheme, but I’ve […]

The Court of Appeals released a number of opinions yesterday.  Bob Farb will undoubtedly release his inimitable summaries shortly — to sign up to receive the summaries by email, go […]