North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

It has long been the rule in North Carolina that all that is required for a judge to revoke probation is a finding that the defendant has violated a valid […]

In North Carolina a probationer has a statutory right to counsel at a probation violation hearing. G.S. 15A-1345(e); G.S. 7A-451(a)(4). The probationer can also waive the right to assistance of […]

I was at a meeting at the Department of Correction yesterday talking about some of the changes made by the Justice Reinvestment Act (JRA, summarized here). One of the big […]

The Governor signed the Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192 (H 642)) into law last week. It makes substantial changes to the law of sentencing and corrections in North Carolina—easily the […]

I’ve mentioned the big legislative changes pending in HB 642 (the Justice Reinvestment Act, which was discussed in House Appropriations this morning), but I haven’t written about an important criminal […]

The rules for sentencing a defendant to special probation—a split sentence—are set out in G.S. 15A-1351(a). Under that law, the court can order as part of a probationary sentence that […]

Under G.S. 7A-272(c), the district court has jurisdiction to accept a defendant’s plea of guilty or no contest to a Class H or I felony in certain circumstances. The law […]

According to data from the Division of Community Corrections, 1270 probationers had their probation revoked in December 2010. Of those, 232 revocations were based on new crimes. I’ve written before […]

North Carolina’s prisons are crowded now, but they were really crowded in the early 1990s. To keep the system functioning, the state ramped up the rules for sentence reduction credit […]

The Department of Correction runs substance abuse treatment programs for probationers and certain parolees: DART-Cherry in Goldsboro for men, and, as of last year, Black Mountain Substance Abuse Treatment Center […]