A UNC School of Government Blog
The principal probation reform bill (S.L. 2009-372 [S 920], summarized here) went into effect on December 1. Since then, I’ve received a number of questions about it, many of them from probation officers. One of their main concerns relates to the way some of the amendments to the law are reflected in the new AOC … Read more
A recent court of appeals case, Blaylock v. N.C. Department of Correction-Division of Community Corrections, has spurred to write about something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while: probation officer liability when a supervised offender hurts someone. In Blaylock, a probation officer was supervising a mentally ill probationer named James Oakes who had … Read more
Under G.S. 15A-1343(c1), defendants placed on supervised probation must pay a monthly supervision fee of $30, unless exempted by the court. That exemption may only be granted for good cause upon motion of the defendant. Over the past month or so I’ve received many calls from people who have heard that legislation from the past … Read more
Suppose a defendant is convicted of a crime and the judge wants to (or, in a “C” or “C/I” cell in the sentencing grid, has to) suspend the sentence. Can the defendant refuse probation and elect to serve the sentence? Unless the defendant’s crime was committed prior to January 1, 1997, the answer is no. … Read more
The First Amendment says, in part, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” There are two religion clauses in the amendment, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the Free Exercise … Read more
How long can a defendant be on probation for a single conviction? A. Five years. B. Eight years. C. It depends. The best answer is C. A judge can sentence any defendant (community or intermediate, misdemeanant or felon) to probation for up to five years on a finding that a period longer than the statutory … Read more
Back in July the court of appeals decided State v. Hubbard, a probation revocation case that I mentioned in passing but never really discussed in depth. In Hubbard the defendant’s probation officer filed a violation report alleging that Mr. Hubbard violated probation by being “so drunk that he could hardly walk” during a curfew check. … Read more
What does it mean to “abscond” from probation supervision? “Absconder” is not defined statutorily; rather, it is defined in Division of Community Corrections (DCC) policy as “an offender who is actively avoiding supervision by making his/her whereabouts unknown to the supervising officer.” DCC makes a searchable list of all absconders available to the public here … Read more
The General Assembly has passed several interesting pieces of legislation recently, but none are more consequential than S 920, the probation reform bill signed by Governor Perdue last week. I previously expressed my hope that Jamie Markham, our sentencing and corrections expert, would summarize and analyze the bill, and fortunately for all of us, he’s … Read more
Several recent news stories that may be of interest: 1. Governor Perdue just signed S 920, which makes substantial changes to the probation laws. For example, it requires all probationers to submit to warrantless searches by probation officers, and to a lesser degree, by law enforcement officers. It also clarifies the tolling provisions of the … Read more