Policy Watch Investigates

Lack of implementing language in amendment legislation raises additional concerns When the General Assembly’s legislative session closed last week, six amendments to the state constitution had been approved for November’s ballot.

Viola Williams has been crunching numbers and working out possible solutions since last week, when the General Assembly fast-tracked a controversial bill that makes sweeping changes to early voting.

On May 25, the news headlines read that Democratic state Senate candidate Jen Mangrum had been disqualified from her bid to unseat Sen. Phil Berger, arguably the most powerful state lawmaker in North Carolina. Republicans had challenged Mangrum’s residency in Berger’s district near the Virginia line, and a panel of election officials from Berger’s Senate District 30 voted on party lines to oust Mangrum...

A new bill to relocate the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument on UNC’s flagship Chapel Hill campus aims to be a compromise in the contentious, decades-long fight over the statue.

As LGBTQ advocates face an uphill battle to expand North Carolina’s existing Hate Crime laws this legislative session, they do so against a backdrop of increased violence against lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Much has been written this week about the process of the secretly-crafted $23.9 billion budget unveiled by the General Assembly’s GOP majority Monday night.

In one of the largest campaign donation forfeitures in state history, 48 improper donations from the Pfizer Inc. political action committee will be forfeited by political campaigns and committees across the state.

When Andrea Hudson was pulled over for a routine traffic violation in 2013, the police officer found outstanding warrants for her arrest. The charges – abusing an elderly person and fraud – were a surprise to Hudson, who insisted it was a case of mistaken identity. Her bail was initially set at $10,000 – out of reach for the mother of two. Even pulling together the ten to fifteen percent that’s necessary to pay a bail bond agent to secure her release was a stretch. When a judge raised the bail to $30,000, she could see no way out.

Equal access to justice isn’t a partisan issue, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht told a crowd of more than 100 at the N.C. Bar Association Tuesday. It just looks like one.

The inequity of the cash bail system is something Orange County has long understood. The county is one of dozens across the state that supports pretrial services - a jail alternative system that identifies poor people who are low risks for violence and likely to show for their court dates and allows them to be released on very low or no bail.

In a unanimous vote by its board of county commissioners, Orange County recently became one of the latest jurisdictions to proclaim their support for the 3DaysCount campaign.

When Cherise Fanno Burdeen talks about the U.S. justice system, she’s speaking from more than 20 years of experience. After getting her Master’s degree in Criminal Justice at Indiana University, she worked with the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice, did post-9/11 work with the Department of Homeland Security and field work with the Safer Foundation in Chicago.

In a 2016 report, the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice called for pretrial justice reform – reform that would move the state away from a de facto system of requiring all criminal defendants to post a cash bail in order be released from jail prior to their day in court.

Gregory Weeks had a distinguished career as as judge for Fourth Division of the Superior Court of North Carolina and Senior Resident Superior Court Judge for the 12th Judicial District.

David Clark works in the Guilford County Public Defender’s Office, representing clients charged with high level felonies. All of them are presumed innocent until proven guilty, but that doesn’t mean they receive equal treatment.