North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

  Prosecutors don’t have an automatic right to appeal an order expunging convictions from a person’s criminal record, a narrowly divided North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled in a case of first impression. “J.C.” pleaded guilty to one count of ...

Tagged with: Expunction

  A man convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl will get a new trial because the indictment didn’t identify the victim by name, a divided North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled. In 2015, Michael Lee White was convicted of ...

Tagged with: Identification

A trial court didn’t abuse its discretion by denying a defendant’s request for a new trial based on the existence of allegedly impermissible inconsistencies in the jury’s verdicts with respect to the “materially false and misleading” statements at issue in ...

  The parents of a 20-year-old killed in a drunken driving wreck in North Carolina has confidentiality settled a lawsuit against the bar that served the drunk driver for $850,000, the family’s attorney reports. Hunt Willis of Martin & Jones ...

Tagged with: Dram Shop

Graduation day was no doubt exhilarating for the hundreds of law school graduates in North Carolina who collected their J.D.’s this month, and just as much so for the law schools proudly sending them off into the world. The grads ...

Tagged with: Law School

  Defendants who prevail in an action in small claims court can’t bring any compulsory counterclaims that would exceed that court’s jurisdictional limit via an appeal since another avenue for relief already exists, the North Carolina Court of Appeals has ...

Tagged with: Landlord/Tenant

  A district court judge in Cumberland County has been publicly reprimanded by the North Carolina Supreme Court after a finding that her complaints about the local chief judge and some of her conduct in the courtroom were harmful to ...

Tagged with: judge

  A Mecklenburg County man was correctly kept off a state-maintained list that tracks people who are deemed unfit to care for children because the government failed to properly notify him of his impending inclusion, the Court of Appeals has ...

Tagged with: list

  A Wake County man who was convicted of first-degree murder is entitled to a new trial because the trial judge allowed racially-charged statements from the prosecution during closing arguments that biased the jury, a divided North Carolina Court of ...

Tagged with: Race Discrimination

A store owner who had held a right of first refusal to purchase the shop from which it operated lost that right when it failed to renew its multi-year lease and the lease reverted to a year-to-year tenancy by law, ...