North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

North Carolina has a lot of habitual offender laws: habitual felon, violent habitual felon, armed habitual felon, habitual breaking and entering, habitual impaired driving, and habitual misdemeanor assault. A question that comes up is the extent to which these laws may permissibly interact with one another. Today’s post considers a few of the combinations I get asked about from time to time.

At a recent conference, a judge confessed to me that he and his fellow judges drive the clerks crazy because they all pronounce judgment differently. They use different words to order the same things. That’s fine to a point—this isn’t Hogwarts, and a sentence is not a magic spell. (If it were, and you wanted to punish somebody by, say, placing them in a full body-bind, obviously you’d just say petrificus totalus and that would be that.)

For us Muggles here in North Carolina, I thought it might be useful to offer some standard language that a judge might use to order the most common types of sentences. These are just suggestions, drawn from the General Statutes and the language used on the boilerplate judgment forms.

Many of you have received one of those letters: a notice from the N.C. Department of Public Safety, Division of Adult Correction (DAC), Section of Combined Records, seeking “clarification” of a judgment. Combined Records audits judgments as they come in, identifying issues and sentencing errors and bringing them to the attention of the court system. Today’s post considers the legal basis for this review, and some of the issues it raises.

Today’s post is a video explaining the rules for extending probation in North Carolina. It covers the two different types of extensions, and answers the question of how many times a case may be extended, and for how long. I hope you’ll take a look.

A defendant is sentenced to 10–21 months for a Class H felony. How much time will he or she actually serve? What about a Class D felon sentenced to 59–83 months?

A North Carolina defendant has a common law right to be personally present when a criminal sentence is pronounced. That right is separate from the constitutional right to be present at trial, State v. Pope, 257 N.C. 326 (1962), and a waiver of the sentencing right should not be inferred from the defendant’s absence at trial. When a defendant is tried and found guilty in absentia (because he or she fled in the middle of the trial, or perhaps behaved in a disorderly fashion), we generally recommend that prayer for judgment be continued until the defendant can be brought before the court for sentencing. See Jessica Smith, N.C. Superior Court Judges’ Benchbook: Trial in the Defendant’s Absence. In one case the court of appeals held that a trial judge did not err by proceeding to sentence a defendant after he fled the courthouse, primarily because his lawyer remained and did not ask for a continuance. State v. Miller, 142 N.C.App. 435 (2011). But in light of earlier cases, the better practice is to wait. See, e.g., State v. Stockton, 13 N.C. App. 287 (1971) (citing several supreme court cases deeming sentences entered in a defendant’s absence to be defective).

In North Carolina we have a fair number of habitual and repeat offender punishment provisions—laws that increase a defendant’s punishment because of crimes he or she has committed in the past. Today’s post considers how the prior convictions needed to establish those enhancements factor into the defendant’s prior conviction level.

Some inmates are serving long sentences for older crimes that would receive a much shorter sentence under today’s law. It is clear at this point that they cannot have today’s […]

North Carolina’s first attempt at a presumptive sentencing law was the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA). The law was in effect for offenses committed from July 1, 1981 to September 30, […]

Most people can get behind the idea that inmates should, if able, do some sort of work during their incarceration. By statute, “[i]t is declared to be the public policy […]