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STATE OVERVIEW
North Carolina had over 30,000 DWI arrests in 2020 alone and through our court monitoring program we were able to
observe around 2,400 cases per year in 2019 and 2020. It is important to note that the Court Monitoring Project is only
monitoring a random sample of the overall cases that are handled in certain counties in North Carolina. Due to the
program being reliant on mostly volunteers to attend court sessions, the counties that we monitor can change throughout
the year due to the loss of a volunteer.
MADD’s North Carolina Court Monitoring Program observes DWI cases in counties throughout the state with funding
provided by the Governors Highway Safety Program. Data is collected by trained volunteers and staff by observing court
proceedings held in District Court throughout the state. Volunteers monitored weekly in 10 counties while a dedicated
staff member covered an additional 9 counties on a rotating basis. Most volunteers attend one court session the same
day every week and observe any DWI cases on the docket for that day. A new court monitor was trained to observe in
court in Robeson County in early 2020 but was unable to attend any court proceedings due to the COVID-19 shut down.
Additional information is collected from the public use terminals at clerk of court’s office. Due to the courts being closed
for several months and capacity limited from the COVID-19 pandemic, most data from April through December 2020 was
collected through the public use terminals which limits the available data to that which was entered into the system by the
court clerks.
Through the examination of the data from the years 2019- 2020, the following are overall general observations followed by
a more in depth look at five of the counties with court monitoring in North Carolina:
In the data, we see that 73% of cases monitored were found guilty and 19% dismissed. It is important to note that this
statistic varies greatly from county to county. In some counties we observed almost the same number of dismissals as
guilty verdicts. We observed that almost 40% of offenders have at least one previous conviction for DWI with some as
many as 10 previous convictions. More than 60% of offenders were between the ages of 21 – 39 years old and almost
75% were males.
Total Number of Open and Adjudicated Cases 2019-2020
Overall Disposition of cases 2019-2020
0%
19%
2094
8%
2811
73%
Guilty Not Guilty Dismissed Amended
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