This blog is full of posts about the laws governing sentencing for misdemeanor DWI. Until now, however, I haven’t written much about how DWIs are actually sentenced. That’s because I didn’t know. While the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission (“Sentencing Commission”) annually publishes a statistical report on the sentencing of felonies and misdemeanors, that report doesn’t include information about DWI sentences, which are governed by G.S. 20-179 rather than the Structured Sentencing Act. Thanks to the Sentencing Commission’s recent focus on DWI sentencing, however, I now have statistics about how DWIs are sentenced in courtrooms across North Carolina. And I think you’ll be interested in what they show. The source. The Sentencing Commission compiled statistics on the 34,278 DWIs that were sentenced in fiscal year 2015 (July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015) and the 1,609 active terms of imprisonment for DWI that concluded that fiscal year. The data was gathered from the Administrative Office of the Courts’ (AOC’s) Automated Criminal Infraction System (ACIS) and the Department of Public Safety’s Offender Population Unified System (OPUS). The breakdown. Nearly 60 percent of misdemeanor DWIs (19,720 to be exact) were sentenced at the lowest level of punishment: Level 5. Two percent (643) were sentenced at the highest level of punishment: Aggravated Level 1. Sixty percent of DWI sentences placed the defendant on unsupervised probation, while 33 percent placed the offender on supervised probation. Only 7 percent of DWI sentences imposed an active term of imprisonment. This does not mean, of course, [...]
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