Case Summaries – Supreme Court of North Carolina (April 16, 2021)

This post summarizes criminal decisions released by the Supreme Court of North Carolina on April 16, 2021. In the absence of substantial evidence of incompetency, the trial court was not required to sua sponte conduct another competency hearing for a defendant found capable of proceeding eight months earlier. State v. Allen, ___ N.C. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___ (Apr. 16, 2020). In 2015, the defendant was charged with several drug crimes and with having attained habitual felon status. In November 2016, a forensic psychologist evaluated the defendant and determined that he suffered from an intellectual disability, memory impairment, and overall neurological dysfunction, and that he was not capable of proceeding to trial. An evaluation in February 2017 by a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, reached the same conclusion. After another evaluation in June 2017, however, Dr. Berger concluded that the defendant was capable of proceeding to trial. At the ensuing pretrial competency hearing in August 2017, the trial court determined that the defendant was capable to proceed. The charges came on for trial in February 2018 and the defendant was convicted by a jury of several substantive drug crimes and then pled guilty to having attained habitual felon status. On appeal, a divided panel of the Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court erred by failing to conduct another competency hearing before the defendant’s trial began. State v. Allen, 269 N.C. App. 24 (2019). The panel noted that the trial court has a constitutional duty to initiate competency hearings on its own [...]