North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

  An esteemed criminal defense attorney once told Lawyers Weekly that some of the best work he’s done for clients has been on the front end of investigations, preventing arrests from happening in the first place. Joe Cheshire of Raleigh ...

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  For juvenile murderers, being sentenced to spend their natural lives in prison is a judgment reserved for those whom the court has explicitly found can never be rehabilitated—the “irreparably corrupt” and “permanently incorrigible.” So where a Mecklenburg County trial ...

Tagged with: Life Sentence

  A group of children injured while crossing a highway to board their school bus have agreed to settle their claims for $902,500, the children’s attorneys report. Jay Kerr of Asheville reported that the students were struck by an SUV ...

Tagged with: Negligence

  Entering a murder victim’s skeletal remains into evidence for a jury to see was more probative than prejudicial, the North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled in a case of first impression. Rodney Enoch was convicted of murdering his ...

Tagged with: murder

Recent changes in the military retirement system might call for legal professionals to familiarize themselves with the new standard operating procedures. One of those changes, perhaps the most significant to family law attorneys—especially those who practice in “military towns”—is the ...

Tagged with: Military

“The results from North Carolina’s July 2018 Bar Exam show that our state continues to have one of the lowest overall bar pass rates in the nation.” Those words, from Elon School of Law Dean Luke Bierman, sum up July’s ...

Tagged with: Bar Exam

  Where a motorist shot out the tire of another moving vehicle allegedly trying to run him off the road, he intended to “strike the blow” and was entitled to a self-defense instruction to the jury that included no-duty-to-retreat language ...

Tagged with: Stand your ground

For many, lawyering is not a 9-to-5 job. So, where an attorney requested a continuance on a Friday but failed to check his email after the 5 o’clock whistle blew, the trial court did not err when it held court ...

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  Where sentence structure and punctuation cause confusion, the state Court of Appeals stands ready to provide clarity. A three-judge panel did just that recently, unmuddling a comma-heavy statute and holding that state law does not authorize an award of ...

Tagged with: attorney's fees

  In relationships, exactly what constitutes “a keeper” is different for everyone. Even within a single North Carolina statute, there are two distinct meanings. Unfortunately for the defendant in State v. Rogers, the Supreme Court of North Carolina held recently ...

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