The School of Government has endeavored to help prosecutors carry out their important work for more than 75 years. We pick up where law school education ends, helping prosecutors understand how legal principles apply in the real world of the state’s trial and appellate courts. For many years, we published the North Carolina Prosecutors’ Trial Manual, a 1,000-plus-page paper resource that identified, explained, and expounded upon the criminal procedure that governs the prosecution of crimes in North Carolina. When it came time to update the manual, we wanted to do more. We envisioned a digital knowledge base that would contain not only updated information from the existing manual but also would incorporate other reference material, such as links to relevant blog posts and articles, prosecutors’ own comments and questions, and samples of relevant trial motions and appellate briefs. And we wanted all of that material to be searchable and easily accessed from a smart phone or laptop. 

We created NC PRO, a digital knowledge base on criminal law and procedure for North Carolina prosecutors, to carry out that vision. We believe this resource will help prosecutors do their work more fairly, quickly, and effectively. We hope that NC PRO users will agree.