State v. Hunt

BRADY, Justice.

Henry Lee Hunt (petitioner), convicted of two capital murders over seventeen years ago, challenges the lawfulness of the charging instruments used to indict him for first-degree murder. These instruments, known as “short-form indictments,” have been used to charge murder suspects under North Carolina law for over a hundred years. This appeal therefore raises a question of critical importance to the legal validity of virtually every murder conviction secured in this state over the past century.

The dispositive issue in the present case is whether the United States Supreme Court’s…