North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

There are about 10,000 people on post-release supervision (PRS) in North Carolina. Some of them get charged with a new crime. That new charge usually prompts the issuance of a PRS warrant. And when a person is arrested on one of those, it is generally understood that there is no entitlement to bail. So, even if the new charge is relatively minor, the post-release supervisee will often be held in jail until the new charge is resolved. A question that comes up again and again is whether the defendant is entitled to jail credit against the new conviction for the time spent detained on the pending PRS violation.

My colleague Jamie Markham and I have received quite a few questions lately about jail credit for consolidated sentences. Jamie has written several blog posts over the years explaining the various jail credit laws. However, there are no statutes or case law that govern the peculiar scenarios that come up regarding consolidated sentences.

Suppose a defendant is being held on two charges, Charge A from County A and Charge B from County B. He was arrested for both at the same time and has been held on both for the same number of days. For whatever reason, Charge A is handled first (perhaps because County A has managed to resume pandemic court operations more quickly than County B), and let’s say it results in a sentence to time served. If Charge B ultimately results in a conviction, can the defendant receive jail credit for the days of pretrial confinement that were already applied to Charge A?

I get at least one jail credit question almost every day. How jail credit is tabulated and applied can be as important as the sentence itself in determining how long a person will be behind bars. Today’s post covers the basics, which are sometimes misunderstood.

When imposing a split sentence, the court has a choice to make about what to do with whatever pretrial jail credit the defendant might have in the case. Apply it to the split? Or apply it to the defendant’s suspended sentence? Today’s post discusses a few issues associated with that choice.

When a person has pretrial jail credit shared between multiple charges, and those charges result in consecutive sentences, the shared jail credit gets applied only once. Does it matter which individual sentence gets the credit?

A legislative session wouldn’t be complete without a new jail credit rule for confinement in response to violation (CRV).

When a person has so much jail credit that he has served his entire sentence of imprisonment, may he nonetheless be sentenced to probation? In other words, may a court sentence someone to probation when there is no sentence left to suspend?

Two revisions to North Carolina’s primary jail credit statute, G.S. 15-196.1, will kick in on December 1, 2015. Both of them benefit defendants.

If a defendant is arrested on Monday, detained all week, and sentenced on Friday, how many days of jail credit does he get?