Costs "Not Assessed"

Under G.S. 7A-304(a), when a defendant is convicted, court costs “shall be assessed,” unless the court waives them pursuant to a written order determining that there is just cause to do so. Assess or waive—those are, in general, the statutory options. They are not, however, the only things that happen in real life. We can see in the AOC’s annual report on court cost waivers (discussed and linked here) that there are other possible outcomes, including costs being flagged as “not assessed.” That is the subject of today’s post. What does it mean to “not assess” a cost? The option to record a cost as not assessed was added to CCIS (the AOC’s computer system for criminal cases) in 2014, in response to concerns that “waived” had taken on a special meaning in 2011 with the introduction of the requirement for just cause findings. If the judge indicated that he or she did not want a particular cost to apply, but did not make the findings required to waive it, the “not assessed” code gave the clerk a more accurate way to memorialize what the judge actually did in the case. But just because a code is always available does not mean it is always permissible. To the contrary, I think there are only a relatively small set of circumstances where “not assess” is a proper course of action. For example, when a person is sentenced for multiple offenses during the same term of court and would ordinarily be required to [...]