North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

  St. Augustine is said to have prayed, “God, make me good, but not just yet.” In North Carolina, a prayer for judgment continued, known as a PJC, is a somewhat similar sort of prayer—a defendant pleads guilty to a ...

Tagged with: PJC

In 2011, before the so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws rocketed to national attention after the shooting of an unarmed teenager in Florida, North Carolina lawmakers passed a stand-your-ground law almost identical to the one in Florida. At the time, the ...

Tagged with: Stand your ground

  The family of the man who was killed after a driver of a truck towing a cement pourer ran a red light and T-boned his vehicle has settled a lawsuit for $1.575 million, the family’s attorney reports. Charles Hinnant ...

Tagged with: cocaine

  Overruling 22 years of precedent, the en banc 4th U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that Chapter 13 debtors may divide some undersecured home mortgage loans into secured and unsecured claims and “cram down” the unsecured portion of such loans. The ...

Tagged with: mortgage

Allowing a young visitor to Colonial Williamsburg to eat his homemade meal with classmates in a historic tavern might be a necessary accommodation to his special dietary needs, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last ...

Taking a position for the first time on the standard necessary to demonstrate forfeiture of a defendant’s constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him, the North Carolina Court of Appeals applied the preponderance of the evidence standard to find ...

  A man who claimed that he was entrapped into meeting a supposed teenage boy for sex, only to learn to his chagrin that the “boy” was really an undercover detective, is not entitled to a new trial, a divided ...

Tagged with: entrapment

  The family of a man who died six months after a pair of steel beams he was unloading crashed on top of him has won a $6 million verdict against a steel company that failed to properly secure the ...

Tagged with: Wrongful Death

  A North Carolina man who survived a sightseeing airplane crash in California has settled with the plane operator’s owner for $225,000, his attorneys report. The fortunate flier, whose name was withheld pursuant to a confidentiality agreement, was vacationing in ...

Tagged with: Airplane Crash

  A new proposed ethics opinion would allow attorneys to request access to view the private portions of social media profiles belonging to people not represented by an attorney—but it would not allow them to request such access from people ...

Tagged with: Social Media