North Carolina’s Decriminalization of Most Local Ordinance Violations

Senate Bill 300 was an omnibus criminal justice reform bill passed last year. One of its provisions presumptively decriminalizes most violations of local ordinances. In this post, I’ll address some of the questions that have arisen about that provision. Before SB300. Before SB300, the general rule was that “if any person shall violate an ordinance of a county, city, town, or metropolitan sewerage district . . . he shall be guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor.” G.S. 14-4(a). There was an exception for violations of ordinances “regulating the operation or parking of vehicles,” which were typically infractions. G.S. 14-4(b). Some ordinances provided for civil or administrative penalties instead, but most had criminal consequences. SOG faculty member Jessie Smith wrote here about the frequency with which ordinance violations resulted in criminal charges, concluding that in 2018, there were more than 10,000 charges of this kind in North Carolina. The criminalization of ordinance violations in North Carolina dates back at least a century. In Board of Educ. of Vance County v. Town of Henderson, 126 N.C. 689 (1900), the court explained why ordinances came to carry criminal penalties. It noted that originally, a municipality could “fix penalties for the violation of its ordinances, and . . . enforce these penalties by civil action” but could not “create criminal offenses.” But “it was found to be almost impossible to administer and enforce a proper police government in towns and cities by means of [civil] penalties alone,” and it “therefore became necessary to make the [...]