Criminal Monetary Obligations Bench Card Available

The School of Government has published a new resource on Monetary Obligations in North Carolina Criminal Cases. You can call it a bench card if you want (everyone seems to love a bench card these days), but it is not intended solely for judges. A .pdf of the publication is available here. I also have a printed version that I hope to get into the hands of many of our readers this fall at conferences and trainings. It uses a clever fold-out that may or may not have drawn design inspiration from a Rand McNally social studies fact sheet that one of my younger, um, colleagues had at the house. The order of the pages will—I hope—make a little more sense when you have the printed version in hand. The main objective of the card is to help bring greater precision to matters related to money in criminal court. First, there is precision as to the type of obligation in question. There are many different types of monetary obligations—costs, attorney fees, other fees, fines, and restitution—and the statutory rules applicable to them vary. The card groups all of the possible obligations into categories and lists them in the table on page 3. Second, there is precision as to available relief. There has been a lot of talk about the limitations on judges’ authority to waive and remit certain obligations, but waiver and remission are not the only avenues for relief. The card shows five distinct categories of permissible relief (waiver, ordering [...]