Sentencing Health Control Measures

Whenever I teach about Structured Sentencing, I usually start by saying that the law covers most North Carolina crimes, with a few exceptions. Capital felonies and violent habitual felons have their own sentencing rules. And of course so does impaired driving. But a final exception carved out of Structured Sentencing in G.S. 15A-1340.10 is G.S. 130A-25, failure to comply with health control measures. I don’t typically spend much time on those rules, though, as there are only a handful of convictions under them in the state each year (seven in 2019). Now seemed like a good time to take a look. Violations of certain health control measures are punished as provided in G.S. 130A-25(b). The rule applies to violations of G.S. 130A-144(f), which covers compliance with control measures, and violations of G.S. 130A-145, which governs quarantine and isolation orders. Jeff Welty talked a bit about the substance of those regulations here in the context of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, by reference to the work of my incredible (and now incredibly busy) public health colleague Jill Moore. To be clear, these are public health restrictions, not to be confused with the emergency restrictions promulgated by the Governor under G.S. 166A-19.30. Violations of those emergency restrictions—like the stay-at-home order Shea discussed yesterday—are enforceable as regular Class 2 misdemeanors under G.S. 14-288.20A. As Jill discussed here, the health control measures discussed in G.S. 130A-144(f) are established by the North Carolina Commission for Public Health through administrative rulemaking (for example, 10A NCAC 41A.0201, which covered [...]