Following years of discussion and drafts, a formal Rules of Conduct for Magistrates was promulgated by the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) effective October 1, 2021. Statutory […]
Interim Report: Judicial District 21 Bail Project In January 2020, North Carolina’s Twenty-First Judicial District (Forsyth County) implemented a consensus bail reform initiative in the form of a structured decision-making […]
In this earlier blog post, I discussed changes made to North Carolina’s first appearance process, to be effective for criminal processes served on or after December 1, 2021. Additional amendments […]
Note from John Rubin: I regret to report that Emily Coward is leaving the School of Government. In her nine years at the School as part of our Public Defense […]
This is the third in a series of blogs about the changes contained in Session Law 2021-123. It summarizes the new requirement for court ordered mental health assessments, including a […]
Last September, Henderson County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Hendrix was killed in the line of duty after being shot while responding to the scene of a car break-in that had escalated […]
This post summarizes published criminal decisions from the North Carolina Court of Appeals released on November 16, 2021. These summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and […]
I’m pleased to announce a new collaboration between the Public Defense Education team at the School of Government and Indigent Defense Services. I frequently get questions from defense lawyers about […]
Recently I was asked to teach about sentencing in impaired driving cases. I thought the audience might want to know not just the law governing sentencing for impaired driving but […]
As USA Today reports, the defense rested this week in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager from Antioch, Illinois who fatally shot two people and seriously injured a third […]