189 N.C. App. 784 - State v. Watkins’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “On 15 November 2004, defendant pled guilty to financial card theft and having attained habitual felon status. Pursuant to a plea agreement, prayer for judgment was continued to 24 January 2005; by consent of both parties it was continued again until 23 January 2006; and, for reasons that are unclear from the record, it was postponed and rescheduled no less than five more times in 2006. In the interim, defendant was dealing with several federal criminal matters: in April 2005 he was arrested for a federal probation violation and sentenced to a year in federal custody, and in June 2006 he was convicted for possession of a firearm by a felon and sentenced to sixty months in federal prison. Ultimately, defendant was not sentenced in this case until 5 February 2007, more than a year after the date to which sentencing was last continued. At the 5 February 2007 sentencing hearing, defendant contended the trial court was divested of jurisdiction to sentence him because of the lengthy delay. The State responded by speculating that the delay was caused by difficulties transferring defendant from the federal prison system to state court for a hearing. Without further discussion of the issue, the trial court found "in its discretion" that it did have jurisdiction to pronounce a sentence. It then sentenced defendant to a minimum of 64 and a maximum of 85 months imprisonment, the sentence to run concurrently with the federal sentence defendant was serving at the time. The State appealed, a”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 246 N.C. App. 725 - State v. Watkins