Restitution for Drug-Buy Money

Back in March I wrote a post on restitution to government agencies, setting out the general rule in G.S. 15A-1340.37(c) that “[n]o government agency shall benefit by way of restitution except for particular damage or loss to it over and above normal operating costs . . . .” I mentioned in that post that I would write later about restitution to law enforcement agencies for money spent as part of a drug buy, so I’ll do that today. Under G.S. 90-95.3(a), when any person is convicted of an offense under the Controlled Substances Act, the court may order “restitution to any law-enforcement agency for reasonable expenditures made in purchasing controlled substances from him or his agent as part of an investigation leading to his conviction.” When a defendant receives money for drugs from a confidential informant or undercover officer and then is convicted based on that exchange, the law clearly allows the court to order the defendant to repay that money as restitution. Such a reimbursement does not run afoul of the general prohibition against charging a defendant for the ordinary costs of investigating and prosecuting crime.See Evans v. Garrison, 657 F.2d 64 (4th Cir. 1981) (holding it improper for a court to order $2,500 restitution to the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation for its investigative expenses, as they were part of the Bureau’s “normal operating costs”) It is, rather, a way of returning a particular sum of money from a defendant to the agency that exchanged it for the contraband, avoiding any “unjust enrichment” to [...]