Carolina Criminal Defense & DUI Lawyer UpdatesHouse Bill 307, known as Iryna’s Law, took effect December 1, 2025, and represents perhaps the most significant statutory reform to North Carolina’s pretrial release framework in decades.
The legislation emerged in response to a high-profile homicide in Charlotte and puts into effect sweeping changes to bail procedures, pretrial detention authority, and judicial oversight of release decisions.
The law’s core mechanism is the creation of rebuttable presumptions against the release of defendants charged with specified violent offenses or who have prior violent-offense records. Presumptions shift the baseline inquiry from “why should this defendant be detained,” to “why should this defendant be released despite the statutory presumption.”
offenses also taxes and therefore profits them. Is that right? Does that make sense? Should the government profit from crime? Is it OK to tax Drugs? Extortion? What about Illegal Pornography, Prostitution and Human Trafficking? Where do we, the governed, draw the line?
question in constitutional law. When government agents enter private property without a warrant, what happens to the evidence they obtain?
sympathy.
government trust against the structural necessity of constitutional discipline. Whether this evolution strengthens justice or weakens liberty depends on how future courts interpret the limits of “reasonableness” in applying the Good Faith Exception to the Exclusionary Rule.
law in decades. The opinion not only interprets N.C.G.S. § 15A-974 but also redefines how North Carolina courts understand the relationship between the Fourth Amendment and Article I, Section 20 of the North Carolina State Constitution.