All the Probation Effective Dates

Any person, felon or misdemeanant, can be on probation for up to 5 years. In some cases—assuming you did the extension just right—probation could be as long as 8 years. So, there are some pretty old probation cases hanging around. But probation in North Carolina doesn’t look the same as it looked eight years ago. If you read this blog, you know that there have been many changes to North Carolina’s probation law over the past half-decade or so. The proper way to handle a violation hearing varies for the 86,653 people on probation today, depending on the date of their underlying offense, the date they were placed on probation, the date of their alleged violation, and the date of the violation hearing itself. Today’s post pulls a summary of those changes into one place, in the hope that it will help you apply the right law to the particular probationer before the court. Offenses committed on or after January 1, 1997 The law allowing a probationer to elect to serve his or her suspended sentence was repealed. S.L. 1995-429. (This change is older than the other ones I’ll discuss below, but I get asked about it a lot, and I included it to make clear that it was in no way connected to Justice Reinvestment.)   Offenses committed on or after December 1, 2009 Warrantless searches by probation officers and law enforcement officers were made regular conditions of supervised probation. For earlier offenses, warrantless searches could have been ordered as a [...]