RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina's highest court on Friday left intact a murder conviction that a lower appeals court had thrown out on the grounds that a jury shake-up during deliberations violated the defendant's rights and required a new trial.

By a 5-2 decision, the state Supreme Court reversed last year's decision of a state Court of Appeals panel that had sided with Eric Ramond Chambers, who has been serving a sentence of life in prison without parole.

The state constitution says no one can be convicted of a crime except by “the unanimous verdict of a jury in open court” that state justices have declared in the past repeatedly must be composed of 12 people.

A 2021 state law says an alternate juror can be substituted for one of the 12 after deliberations begin as long as the judge instructs the amended jury to begin deliberations anew. The judge at Chambers' 2022 trial did just that when an alternate juror joined deliberations because an original juror couldn’t continue the next day due to a medical appointment.

NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of an eastern European neo-Nazi group has been extradited to the United States from Moldova following his arrest last summer for allegedly instructing an undercover federal agent to dress as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to Jewish children and racial minorities, prosecutors said.

Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 21-year-old from the republic of Georgia, was arraigned Friday before a federal judge in Brooklyn on multiple felonies, including soliciting hate crimes and acts of mass violence.

He pleaded not guilty through an attorney, Samuel Gregory, who requested his client receive a psychiatric evaluation and be placed on suicide watch while in custody. Gregory did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili, who also goes by “Commander Butcher," as the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that adheres to a “neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups it deems ‘undesirables.’”