​Effective December 1, 2019 the legal age to be charged as an adult for many crimes will be raised to age 18 years of age in North Carolina. The Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act essentially brings NC in line with the rest of the country as treating most 16 and 17 year olds as juveniles for criminal prosecution purposes. There are of course some major exceptions such as for traffic violations and serious felonies. Although the law still needs to be amended to fix some potential pitfalls this is a major victory for equal justice as NC was essentially putting its own juveniles at a competitive disadvantage by exposing them to adult criminal records for minor offenses such as larceny, trespassing, alcohol offenses, and simple possession of drugs. 

​Governor Roy Cooper recently signed a new expungement law that went into effect on December 1, 2017. The main change is a reduction in the wait period to expunge non-violent misdemeanor and felony convictions. A primary goal of Senate Bill 445, which was a bipartisan effort, is allowing more people to clear their criminal record faster. The hope is 2 million North Carolina residents with criminal records will be able to get jobs after they have paid their debt to society. 

​If you have been told your license is permanently revoked in North Carolina the situation may seem hopeless. The easy solution many reach is to just keep driving without a license- this is usually a huge mistake and makes a fixable situation that much worse! Even a permanent revocation is not really permanent- it usually just means you have to wait 3 years to get a hearing to restore your license. That being said there may be hope in the form of a Limited Driving Privilege "LDP" or by going back and re-opening old cases via a Motion for Appropriate Relief "MAR". 

If you have an old unpaid traffic ticket in North Carolina or any other State your driving license privileges have likely been indefinitely suspended. This forces drivers to handle tickets they receive when driving through their home State or even another State, otherwise what incentive would someone have to pay a ticket if there were no consequences for simply pretending it did not exist? The Interstate Driver License Compact is an agreement between 45 of the 50 States to share information about traffic tickets. The National Driver Register keeps track of when an individual is suspended in one (1) State, which generally results in a suspension of most States. In North Carolina it is important to resolve all outstanding issues from all counties and other States simultaneously to have the best chance for permanent reinstatement.

Insurance points and DMV points are often confused for being one in the same, which is simply not the situation in North Carolina. Most people are simply concerned about the effect of insurance points on their car insurance rate after receiving a traffic citation. DMV points come into play if you receive enough points to result in revocation of your privilege to drive.