I've got a bit of downtime, so I hope y'all are ready for a thread about procedural bullshit and how my morning in court went.

The procedural questions here involve two laws: North Carolina's law providing for probable cause hearings, and NC's victim's rights statute.

The PC statute (NCGS 15A-606) says that, after somebody has been charged with a felony, they must have a probable cause hearing within 15 working days of their initial appearance.

If the state has good cause to put off the hearing, they must provide it in writing to the defense, and they have to do that at least 48 hours before the hearing absent "extraordinary cause."

I have never once seen a probable cause hearing actually take place within 15 days of arraignment. I have never been provided with written notice of good cause to put off the hearing.

In every felony case I have worked, the state has simply moved to continue the case without a hearing and provided no reason at all for not having it on the PC hearing date. I have not once seen a judge give them trouble for doing this.

Meanwhile, we have a so-called victim's rights statute in NC that is designed to give the victims of crime the opportunity to be heard and informed about the cases they are involved in.

It requires the District Attorney's office to ask victims what sorts of proceedings they want to be notified about so that they can appear and be heard, and to then notify those those victims.

Our District Attorney's office has interpreted this to mean that they cannot be forced to schedule a bond hearing that gives them less than two weeks of notice in which to contact the victims in a case covered by the VRA.

So anyway I got assigned a new case on monday of this week that was scheduled for a PC hearing date today. I immediately filed a bond motion, and when I showed up in court today I asked to be heard on bond.

The DA objected, citing the victim's rights statute and saying they hadn't had enough time to notify the victims in the matter.

I replied that the case had been scheduled for a PC hearing today, so they should have known they had to notify the victims regardless of whether I filed a bond motion or not.

I added that the statute required them to hold the PC hearing today and that they had no witnesses present with which to go forward on PC, and that they had not given me notice of any good cause to delay the hearing.

I also pointed out that the VRA doesn't say anywhere that the court is required to delay bond hearings to give prosecutor's time to comply with their obligations under it, and that my client has due process rights that trump the statute anyway.

The prosecutor then complained that I was asking the court to let the Public Defender's office decide for them how much time they reasonably needed to contact victims.

Anyway, the judge ignored my arguments, refused to hear arguments on bond, and wouldn't give me a new bond hearing date until two weeks from today. (I have already tweeted about this judge today) https://twitter.com/Don_Zeko/status/1296801182820847618

So yeah. tl;dr here is that the DA's in this jurisdiction ignore the statutory rights of clients in literally every felony case, most defense attorneys don't even object when they do so, they make up provisions in the law to hold people in jail, and our judges let them do it.

If you are arrested and charged with a crime covered by the victim's rights act (which is a whole lot of crimes), you will probably not be able to get a court to review your bail again until you've spent at least three weeks in jail here.