Castle doctrine, human trafficking, habeas corpus split state Supreme Court

The North Carolina Supreme Court split along party lines Friday in a trio of cases involving the castle doctrine, human trafficking, and a court order used to challenge unlawful imprisonment. In each case, Republican justices outvoted their Democratic colleagues.

Castle doctrine

In State v. Phillips, the court voted 5-2 to send the case back to the Court of Appeals. That intermediate court had ordered a new trial for Angela Benita Phillips, who was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in 2022 after shooting a neighbor during an argument on Phillips’ front porch.

The Appeals Court majority had agreed that a trial judge’s misstatement of North Carolina’s castle doctrine defense during jury instructions had prejudiced Phillips’ case.

“This case presents us with the opportunity to clarify the castle doctrine as established by the legislature,” wrote Justice Phil Berger Jr. for the Supreme Court’s majority.

The General Assembly has expanded castle doctrine protections beyond their origins in the common law, Berger explained.

“It has long been recognized that an individual has a fundamental right to defend his or her home from unlawful intrusion,” he wrote. “The General Assembly, as the policy making branch of our government, has twice chosen to expand that common law principle by broadening the set of circumstances under which deadly force is justified.”

“The plain language of sections 14-51.2 and 14-51.3 demonstrates that if a lawful occupant of a home is cloaked with the protections afforded by the castle doctrine and the State fails to rebut the statutory presumption that the lawful occupant had reasonable fear, he or she is justified in the use of force, including deadly force,” Berger wrote. “This is so because unlike the general self-defense statute, the castle doctrine statute itself provides that it is presumptively reasonable for a lawful occupant of a home to (1) perceive an intruder as a deadly threat and (2) respond to that threat with deadly force.”

The Supreme Court majority agreed with the Appeals Court that the trial judge committed an error by suggesting that the castle doctrine did not give Phillips the right to use “excessive force.”

Yet Supreme Court justices disagreed with the intermediate court about whether that error should automatically lead to a new trial. “[I]t appears the sole basis for the Court of Appeals’ prejudice reasoning was that the trial court’s instruction probably confused the jury. This, standing alone, is insufficient,” Berger wrote.

Democratic justices agreed that the jury instruction was wrong, but they would not have sent the case back to the Appeals Court. They would have decided whether the mistake merited a new trial for Phillips.

“Punting the prejudice analysis back to the lower courts is an unnecessary drain on judicial resources,” wrote Justice Anita Earls in a partial dissent. “It forces Ms. Phillips and the State to reargue an issue already raised, briefed, and ripe for decision. Throughout our precedent, this Court has declined to remand cases based on the same interests at stake here — ‘judicial economy,’ ‘fairness to the parties,’ and settling protracted litigation.”

Human trafficking

In State v. Applewhite, Supreme Court justices split, 4-2, over whether a defendant could be convicted of multiple counts of human trafficking involving the same victim. The court’s majority said yes.

Robin Applewhite faced a prison sentence of 240 to 312 years in prison after a conviction in 2019 of charges including 12 counts of human trafficking involving four women. The court record showed Applewhite and his wife used heroin to entice the women into prostitution.

The Appeals Court upheld the sentence, but dissenting Judge John Arrowood argued that human trafficking amounted to a “continuing offense” that could produce just one charge per victim. Arrowood would have had the case returned to a trial judge to vacate eight of the trafficking charges.

Justice Tamara Barringer’s majority decision for the Supreme Court detailed the “clear and unambiguous” language of North Carolina’s law against human trafficking.

“The plain language … clarifies that human trafficking is not a continuing offense,” Barringer wrote. “The language specifies that violations are separate offenses. The explicit language in the statute that each violation is a separate offense demonstrates that each distinct act of recruiting, enticing, harboring, transporting, providing or obtaining a victim can be separately prosecuted.”

“The evil sought to be prevented by the legislature is the trafficking of persons for the purpose of engaging in prostitution,” Barringer added. “‘Trafficking’ can occur in numerous ways, all of which revolve around whether the defendant did so ‘with the intent that the [victim] be held in involuntary servitude or sexual servitude.’ Thus, a defendant may be convicted of multiple counts of human trafficking per victim.”

Democratic justices dissented. “Human trafficking is an egregious crime, and that fact does not give this Court the right to interpret criminal laws in a way that violates the Double Jeopardy Clause of the United States Constitution,” wrote Justice Allison Riggs. “Mr. Applewhite will spend the rest of his natural life incarcerated even under the constitutional interpretation of the statute put forth in this dissent. Our obligation is to ensure that ambiguous statutes, such as the one at bar here, are interpreted consistent with the Constitution, no matter how odious the crime.”

Habeas corpus

In State v. Daw, justices split 5-2 along party lines in a case involving a prison inmate’s complaint about prison confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Phillip Brandon Daw was serving multiple consecutive prison terms in June 2020 when he filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus. A defendant can pursue that writ to challenge unlawful detention.

Daw claimed “that he was ‘unlawfully and illegally detained’ because the North Carolina Department of Public Safety was ‘incapable of ensuring that [he would] not be exposed to COVID-19,’” according to Berger’s majority opinion.

A trial judge rejected Daw’s claim, and the state released him from prison six days after the state Appeals Court heard his case in February 2021. Rather than throw out the case as moot, the intermediate court used the dispute to determine how two sections of state law affected Daw’s claim.

“[T]he writ of habeas corpus is expressly not available in this State to persons ‘detained by virtue of the final order, judgment or decree of a competent tribunal of civil or criminal jurisdiction,’” Berger wrote for the court’s majority.

“Petitioner here never asserted that his detention was unlawful for a jurisdictional defect, and because he was detained by virtue of the final judgments of a competent court of criminal jurisdiction, the trial court correctly relied on section 17-4 when it summarily denied petitioner’s application for the writ of habeas corpus,” Berger added.

“The Court of Appeals, however, went further; even though inquiry into the availability of habeas relief should have ended with the plain language of section 17-4, it entertained petitioner’s argument that the conditions associated with his confinement entitled him to habeas relief. This was error,” Berger wrote.

“The writ of habeas corpus is a mechanism designed to protect liberty and is a fundamental safeguard against arbitrary detention and abuse of power by the government,” Berger explained. “But the availability of this remedy is textually limited.”

“Judges and courts are therefore constrained by the explicit language of Chapter 17 in reviewing habeas applications,” he added. “Failure to abide by these clear requirements subjects judges and courts to charges of unlawfulness and arbitrariness given the unambiguous statutory scheme. Because the Court of Appeals’ decision amounted to an exercise of legislative power under the guise of statutory interpretation, we expressly disavow its analysis.”

Both Democratic justices wrote dissents.

“Today, the majority closes a door the legislature left open,” Earls argued. “It converts an isolated subpart of a single habeas statute into an ironclad rule. According to the majority, subsection 17-4(2) extinguishes habeas for anyone imprisoned under a final criminal judgment—no exceptions.”

“But that cannot be right. Neighboring statutes require habeas relief when a defendant’s ‘original imprisonment was lawful’ but a later ‘act, omission or event’ demands his discharge,” Earls wrote. “There is no way to reconcile that language with the majority’s newly minted rule. For under the interpretation adopted today, subsection 17-4(2) bars habeas precisely because a defendant’s ‘original imprisonment was lawful.’”

“So one of two things is true: Either the majority is wrong, or the legislature did not mean what it said,” Earls added. “Between those options, the choice should be easy. Language and logic cut against the majority’s wooden interpretation.”

Earls accused colleagues of replacing existing state law with a “pre-Civil War version” of the statutes dealing with habeas corpus. “Today’s holding is the latest effort to turn the Great Writ into a paper tiger. It extinguishes an important safeguard of fundamental freedoms,” she wrote.

Riggs authored a separate dissent to “emphasize how ill-advised it is for this Court to take cases where our decision has no practical effect and the matter needs no prompt resolution,” she wrote.

“Indeed, the majority gives such short shrift to its mootness exception analysis that it becomes clear that the majority was determined to issue a decision significantly altering habeas law in this state, regardless of the propriety of the case utilized to do so,” Riggs added. “This kind of ends-driven jurisprudence is antithetical to the principle of judicial restraint.”

“Making dramatic change to our law via a case in which the issue is no longer justiciable only confirms that this Court believes it is in a law-making role and elevates judicial activism over judicial restraint,” Riggs’ dissent continued.