North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Some states have passed laws authorizing judges to review sentences after a defendant has served a specified portion of the sentence. They are sometimes referred to as “second look” laws. A bill proposing a second-look procedure was filed in the General Assembly in 2025, but it was referred to committee and never enacted. See House Bill 589. Nevertheless, judges around the state are receiving dozens of motions for appropriate relief filed under authority of “The Second Look Act” as though it became law. To be clear, no such law was enacted, and motions premised solely on that theory lack a legal basis.

Under a law that existed from late 1994 to late 1998, North Carolina defendants sentenced to life without parole for offenses committed during that window are entitled to a judicial review after 25 years of imprisonment. I wrote about it here a few years ago, noting that the window for reviews would open in late 2019. Here we are.

North Carolina did away with parole for most crimes with the adoption of Structured Sentencing in 1994. Parole is still permitted in certain impaired driving cases, but infrequently granted in practice. Still, there are over 1,300 persons on parole in North Carolina. They are mostly former inmates who served time for serious offenses under Fair Sentencing (effective from 1981 to 1994) or other prior law. There are also over 2,000 inmates in prison serving sentences that are now or will one day be eligible for parole. Today’s post considers the law of how often those inmates are considered for parole.

In North Carolina, probationers, post-release supervisees, and parolees are subject to warrantless searches—sometimes by a probation-parole officer, sometimes by law enforcement officers. The statutory conditions that apply to each type of offender and officer are not identical. Today’s post collects them all in one place. Before getting into any of the complicated issues about the constitutionality of a warrantless search of a supervised offender, a sensible starting point is a careful look at the language of the search condition itself.

Do DWI sentences really get cut in half? Can DWI inmates be paroled? What happens when the minimum and maximum sentence for a DWI are the same? These questions and more are answered in today’s video post.

A few months ago, I taught a session on DWI sentencing to a group of judges.  As part of that session, I reviewed the rules for determining the parole-eligibility 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 […]