Cooper agreed to the deal in February 2021, settling a lawsuit brought by the NC NAACP, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Disability Rights NC. The settlement required the state to release 3,500 inmates over six months, framed as a public health response to COVID-19 in the prison system. But what Cooper's administration told state lawmakers at the time, that only non-violent offenders nearing the end of their sentences would walk free, turned out to be false. Violent offenders, including convicted murderers and rapists, made the list.... A 2024 state report found that 48 percent of the released inmates reoffended. More than 600 committed serious felonies....When Cooper's team briefed North Carolina's General Assembly on the settlement, prison officials assured legislators that only convicts with sentences ending in 2021 would be released, nobody who had "committed a crime against a person." That assurance later collapsed....The Washington Free Beacon reported that 51 North Carolina convicts serving life sentences for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or first-degree rape appeared on the early release list. Over 90 percent of those lifers secured release after Cooper signed the settlement. These were not low-level drug offenders or people weeks from finishing their terms. They were among the most dangerous people in the state prison system.
Emphasis added.
No majority even of Democratic voters would ever have endorsed this vision of the activist Left. I have no brief for prisons; I think we should completely abolish prisons because they don't work. However, until we develop a democratic agreement about what we might replace them with, this is the alternative: a bad and nonfunctional thing not as a solution, but as a workaround that prevents at least some violent crime being visited on ordinary people. It is the small-d democratic solution even if it is a bad one (as democratic solutions often are: popularity is no guarantee of wisdom, as we all learned in junior high school).
If elected, we can be reasonably sure that Cooper will continue to genuflect to the antidemocratic activist Left; he will, as he has, continue to ignore what his constituents want in favor of what is wanted by those who can advance his power, position, and wealth. I wish his campaign every ill, even though I don't have any positive reason to favor his opponent.
...agreement about what we might replace them with...
ReplyDeleteAustralia worked for England--for a while. Is Iceland available?
Too nice. I have heard that Greenland has recently come under new management, however.
DeleteIt's been known as "sue and settle," and was a strategy frequently used by environmental (and other) activists against EPA and other agencies to bypass Congressional failure-to-act on favored policy legislation..
ReplyDeleteFrancis Menton, posting as the "Manhattan Contrarian," has a short summary of its use, including a recent turn-the-tables example.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2026-5-16-sue-and-settle-two-can-play-this-game
One possible reform might be something on the order of requiring ratification by a/the relevant committee in both House and Senate for any agency settlement with a value (in cash or kind) in excess of $xxxx.
Or something similar.
I'm open to ideas. It's a dastardly practice.
DeleteSo as I read this, I was asking myself "who was responsible for who was on the list, and if violent offenders weren't supposed to be on the list, who failed to keep them off?" I asked AI about it, and it's an interesting answer:
ReplyDeleteQuery:
In the North Carolina consent decree from February 2021, settling a lawsuit brought by the NC NAACP, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Disability Rights NC, how did violent criminals end up on the release list even though they were not supposed to? Whose fault is this?
AI Answer:
In the controversy surrounding the February 2021 consent decree settling the pandemic-era lawsuit (NC NAACP v. Cooper), the presence of individuals with violent crime histories on the 3,500-inmate release list is a subject of sharp political dispute.
The two primary explanations and the differing views on accountability are detailed below.
How Violent Convicts Appeared on the List
The inclusion of individuals with violent pasts or serious convictions occurred primarily through two mechanisms:
1. Retroactive Accounting: In negotiating the settlement, the state sought to reduce the total number of new prisoners it would be forced to discharge into communities. To do this, the parties agreed to count inmates who had already been released through normal state procedures since the start of the pandemic.
• Example: A prominent example is DeCarlos Brown Jr., who was arrested for a fatal stabbing in Charlotte in 2025. Investigators revealed his name was on the 2021 settlement list. However, prison records showed he actually served his full sentence and was released via standard post-release supervision in September 2020—five months before the settlement was even signed. He was added to the list retroactively solely for accounting purposes.
2. Prior Parole Eligibility: A legislative probe revealed that the list included 51 inmates serving life sentences. State prison officials clarified that these individuals were not released indiscriminately; rather, they were inmates who had already been granted parole or were explicitly deemed eligible for parole under existing statutory rules prior to the COVID-19 litigation.
3. Broad Multi-Pronged Mechanisms: While state officials initially stated that early releases would focus strictly on non-violent offenders, the final text of the agreement did not strictly bar all violent cases across all categories. The settlement utilized multiple population-reduction methods—including fast-tracking expedited re-entry for those already near the end of their terms or restoring individuals to community supervision—which inadvertently captured individuals with extensive prior felony histories.
So it seems people agreed to a solution for the consent decree, probably figuring they could blame the other side for it's failure when it failed, even though they were really both to blame for it's failure. I will at least say that the compromise was in some way designed to not discharge any *extra* violent criminals onto the streets, but it was dishonest, and no one seems to be talking about the actual problem, which is still the Dem policies that lead to these people being release even though they are obviously still a threat to the populous (yes, I know it's not your preferred solution Grim, but as you say, it's what we have now).
It's terrible all the way around, but I guess you had the gist of that already, Grim.