Is the NC Court of Appeals Lightening Up on Indictment Issues?

Indictment issues are the bane of the prosecutor’s existence. The rules about how an offense must be alleged in the indictment are highly technical. And because the rules are neither intuitive nor entirely consistent across offenses, they are hard to keep straight. Not surprisingly indictment issues account for a lot of black ink in the appellate reporters. Just how much? In my Criminal Case Compendium, which catalogues all types of criminal cases decided since 2008, there are a full 26 pages of case annotations on indictment issue cases! However, two recent cases, both decided on July 7, 2015, make me wonder whether the Court of Appeals might be loosening up on indictment issues. The first case, State v. James, was a failure to register case. Specifically, the defendant was charged with failing to notify of a change of address. The indictment alleged that the defendant failed to notify the sheriff of a change of address “within three (3) days of the address change.” The relevant statute, however, requires that the notice be made within three business days. Relying on this statutory language, the defendant argued that omission of the word “business” rendered the indictment fatally defective. He had a decent argument; the court of appeals had previously held, in an unpublished opinion, that that the word “business” must be included in an indictment charging a violation of the failure to register statute. While the court agreed “that the better practice would have been for the indictment to have alleged … that [...]