Case Summaries: N.C. Supreme Court (Jan. 31, 2025)

This post summarizes the published criminal opinions from the Supreme Court of North Carolina released on January 31, 2025. These summaries will be added to Smith’s Criminal Case Compendium, a free and searchable database of case summaries from 2008 to the present. North Carolina Constitution’s Article I, Section 27 prohibition of cruel or unusual punishments did not provide greater protection to defendant than the U.S. Constitution's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. State v. Tirado, 267PA21, ___ N.C. ___ (Jan. 31, 2025). In this Cumberland County case, the Supreme Court majority affirmed an unpublished Court of Appeals decision denying defendant’s constitutional challenge to his sentences of life without parole for murders committed while he was a juvenile. In August of 1998, defendant was seventeen years old, and a member of the Crips gang, when he participated in the abduction and robbery of three women; defendant and the gang killed two of the women, but one woman survived. Defendant was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, but the sentence was reduced to two consecutive life sentences without parole after the holding in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), that sentencing juvenile offenders to death was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court subsequently held in Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), that a mandated life without parole sentence for a juvenile was unconstitutional, but permitted sentencing where the trial court had discretion to impose a lesser sentence. Defendant was resentenced in accordance with the Miller-fix statute adopted by the General Assembly, resulting [...]