In keeping with “raise the age” law, Governor establishes new panel that can make recommendations for clemency
Gov. Roy Cooper signed an executive order Thursday forming the state’s Juvenile Sentence Review Board. The advisory board will review the sentences of people who were tried in adult criminal court in their teens over a decade ago, and then make clemency and commutation recommendations to the governor, according to a press release.
Nowadays, most teens under 18 enter juvenile courts first if they don’t have criminal convictions, except if the conviction is a misdemeanor unrelated to impaired driving under North Carolina’s bipartisan Raise the Age Act. Yet before the state enacted the law in December 2019, 16 and 17-year-olds were automatically tried in the state’s adult criminal justice system regardless of their charges.
Dr. David Wohl, UNC School of Medicine (Photo: UNC)
After the state Department of Labor in November rejected a petition to mandate emergency workplace rules, several North Carolina advocacy groups are asking the Wake County Superior Court for a judicial review of the denial.
“Anything we can do to mitigate the transmission of that virus from someone is really essential,” Dr. David Wohl, professor of medicine at the UNC-Chapel Hill said at the virtual press conference hosted by the petitioners on Thursday. “We need to do that especially at our workplace.”
Those most vulnerable at workplaces during COVID-19 are workers in the meatpacking, poultry, agriculture, and health care industry, many of whom often don’t have access to insurance and fear retaliation if they report their employers to authorities, the petition stated.