A "Single Superior Court" for Prior Record Level Purposes

Under G.S. 15A-1340.14(d), when a defendant has more than one prior conviction from a “single superior court during one calendar week,” only the most serious of them counts for prior record points for felony sentencing. What is a “single superior court”? For most defendants with prior superior court convictions, all of the prior convictions will stem from a single set of judgments entered by the same judge in the same courtroom in the same district. That clearly is a “single superior court,” and the law tells us to only count points for the most serious conviction emerging from a calendar week there. But what if a person has multiple prior superior court convictions from different districts in the same week? Do both count? Or just the most serious of them? I’m not aware of an appellate case that answers the question directly. The closest case, I think, is State v. Fuller, 179 N.C. App. 61 (2006), where the court of appeals read G.S. 15A-1340.14(d) literally enough to conclude that a person’s two separate convictions received on the same day in the same county, one in district court and one in superior court, both counted for points. The case turned on different language in the same subsection, but the court’s general logic could be applied to the question posed here: “[t]he statute does not, however, prohibit the use of multiple convictions obtained in different courts in the same week.” Id. at 70–71. Ultimately, it appears to be an open question. But—with Fuller [...]