North Carolina Criminal Law

I recently completed a draft of a bulletin on probation violations. It is working its way through our internal review process. In the meantime, I thought I would post it […]

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Can a probation officer arrest a person being supervised pursuant to a deferred prosecution agreement or G.S. 90-96 judgment? I’ve been asked that question a lot lately. I suspect it […]

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As I traveled around the state teaching about the Justice Reinvestment Act, I had lots of discussions about the various types of confinement that can now be ordered in response […]

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“Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.” So read a sign that an Ohio judge ordered a woman to wear after being convicted for the […]

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Some probationers are subject to a curfew—a time each day (usually in the evening or at night) when they are restricted to their residence. Recent changes to the law have […]

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Under the Justice Reinvestment Act, a probation officer may, through delegated authority, impose a short period of jail confinement in response to a violation of a court-imposed probation condition. The […]

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A frequently asked question of late is whether a judge may still impose special probation (a split sentence) in a probation case. Apparently the question arises out of a sense […]

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In 2012, a person on supervised probation for an offense that occurred before December 1, 2011 moves to another state without permission. Months later he is arrested there and brought […]

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A probation violation must be willful. In this prior post I wrote about the burden-shifting process in which the State must prove to the court’s reasonable satisfaction that a violation […]

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For the past few years, the Section of Community Corrections of the Division of Adult Correction has been transitioning to what they call "evidence-based practices," or EBP. The basic idea is to use series of assessment tools to identify which offenders are mostly likely to reoffend and most in need of programming, and then tailor their supervision accordingly. The process involves some terminology that is probably familiar by now to most probation officers, but may be less familiar to judges, lawyers, and defendants. Today’s post provides an overview of the process probation officers use to sort probationers into different supervision levels and an introduction into what those levels mean for probationers as a practical matter.

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