Conservative lawmakers in Raleigh have sounded the alarms in recent weeks over a Charlotte city ordinance extending discrimination protections to transgender individuals, including their rights to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity — claiming a need to protect children from sexual predators.
Read MoreThree separate challenges to North Carolina’s 2011 redistricting plans are pending in state and federal courts here, and each is on a certain path to the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether they’ll get there in time for any meaningful change to occur ahead of the November elections is less clear though.
Read MoreConservatives rolled out the welcome mat for business when they took control of state government, making clear that unleashing companies from regulatory burdens ranked at the top of their agenda. “The reason I’m running for governor is to represent business,” then Charlotte mayor and longtime Duke Energy employee Pat McCrory told a group from the Council of Independent Business Owners during a 2012 campaign stop in downtown Asheville.
Read MoreThe party of less government rolled into Raleigh after the 2010 elections champing at the bit, eager to fulfill an agenda long delayed. “Regulations kill jobs” became the rallying cry, but as it turned out, that cry only went so far. When it came to voting booths, bedrooms, doctor’s offices and execution chambers, the self-styled opponents of intrusive government injected themselves in ways not seen before in state government.
Read MoreConservative justices hold a 4-3 majority on the ostensibly nonpartisan state Supreme Court and, as party operatives understand well, maintaining that edge has been critical to ensuring Republican control elsewhere throughout the state. “Lose the courts, lose the war.” Political consultant John Davis labeled this “Rule Number Five” in his 2013 report, “How the North Carolina Republican Party Can Maintain Political Power for 114 Years.”
Read MoreState and federal regulators announced a string of court victories and settlements involving predatory for-profit colleges in recent weeks, and while at first glance the numbers are big and the recognition of widespread deception precedential, the impact on student borrowers laden with loan debt might not be so direct.
Read MoreFive years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, rising Democratic star and Newark mayor Cory Booker and aspiring presidential contender and New Jersey governor Chris Christie appeared together on the Oprah Winfrey show for a surprise announcement: “We’re setting up a $100 million challenge grant so that Mayor Booker and Governor Christie can have the flexibility they need to turn Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation,” Zuckerberg told viewers.
Read MoreSecret and swift. That’s what executions in North Carolina would become under a bill headed to the governor’s desk for signature. Despite recent examples of botched prosecutions here that sent innocent men to death row – Henry McCollum comes to mind – and botched executions elsewhere in the country, state lawmakers this morning adopted H774, which eliminates obstacles that have kept the state from carrying out the death penalty since 2006.
Read MoreState lawmakers and governors past and present squared off at the Supreme Court yesterday over who’s empowered to make commission appointments – particularly, in this instance, to the recently created Coal Ash Commission, Oil & Gas Commission and Mining Commission. The dispute between the branches of government came to a head last fall after legislators created the commissions and authorized the House speaker and Senate president to appoint most of the members on each.
Read MoreJust as the U.S. Supreme Court wraps up its term with decisions in several high-profile cases expected in late June, state and federal courts here will be gearing up for what promises to be a long hot summer for voting rights – with more to follow. Several constitutional challenges to the sweeping voting law changes enacted in 2013 head to trial starting in July and the state Supreme Court rehears the redistricting case in August.
Read MoreThe 1983 rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie rocked the small North Carolina town of Red Springs and led quickly to the arrest of two area men – Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. From there the two brothers, whose IQs once measured in the 50s, withstood a trial and then four years later, retrials. They spent thirty-one years behind bars — McCollum, on death row — while attorneys pursued allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and pushed for renewed examination of evidence.
The federal courts in eastern North Carolina have been operating under a state of judicial emergency for years now, though you wouldn’t know it given the lack of a sense of urgency exhibited by the state’s United States senators. Down a judge since December 2005, the courts in this largely rural part of the state have managed one of the heavier district caseloads in the country — relying in large part on help from three senior judges: James C. Fox, age 86; W. Earl Britt, age 83; and Malcolm Howard, age 75.
Read MoreState Supreme Court justices refused to let a surprise snowstorm force yet another rescheduling of arguments in the private school voucher case, opening the courtroom on time Tuesday morning to a less-than-full gallery. Determined to resolve challenges to the state’s recently enacted “Opportunity Scholarship Program” long before the next school year begins, the high court took the case directly in October to review Superior Court Judge Robert H. Hobgood’s August decision declaring the program unconstitutional and fast-tracked it for argument this month.
Read MoreMichael Hendrix had a contract to sell eight of his 24 acres of land at Old Hollow and Germanton Roads in Winston-Salem for morethan a million dollars in early 1998. But because the state Department of Transportation had identified that land as lying in the path of a proposed beltway project running east to west just north of the city, the deal died.
Read MoreCan a state bar a judge from personally soliciting campaign contributions from individuals and organizations? Or does such a ban violate the First Amendment by impinging on the judge’s freedom of speech?
Read MoreThe rubber’s about to meet the road in the voting rights lawsuits pending in federal court here as the parties start to ask the hard questions. What were state GOP lawmakers’ intentions when they enacted House Bill 589, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation?
Read MoreAfter 36 years behind bars, man seeks exoneration. Joseph Sledge may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And for that he’s spent half of his life behind bars. Broke and unemployed in 1973, the Georgia native and Army veteran stole a few boxes of clothes from a department store and landed in a Bladen County prison. While working on a highway litter crew one day in 1976, he got into a fight with another inmate who was then punished with a stint at another prison. When that inmate returned, Sledge – a slight man of 147 pounds – feared for his life and ran.
Read MoreBy all accounts, the 2014 North Carolina Supreme Court race, with four of seven seats up for grabs, is destined for the record books. Already spending in the race is nearing $4 million, with a little under a month to go before votes are counted. And with public financing dollars gone, the candidates are on their own in the escalating hunt for funds.
Read MoreFor years now, complaints about the stench and pollution seeping from the state’s factory hog farms have lingered. In the courts and in the press, residents living with the mess and their advocates have traded barbs with industry and local leaders about failed oversight and influence in the legislature. But now environmental groups have stepped in and, in a precedent-setting complaint filed last week with the Environmental Protection Agency, allege that the state’s lax regulation of hog waste disposal discriminates against communities of color in eastern North Carolina.
Read MoreHere’s what happens when a state admits a wrong but then takes years to get to reparations. Records go missing. Memories fade. People die. And the opportunity to provide at least some recompense is lost. That sad truth is unfolding now as North Carolina finally moves towards fulfilling long-promised redress to some of the thousands unwillingly sterilized here under the state’s sanctioned eugenics program.
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