Democrat Senate candidate and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is shifting blame over the reason he released 4,200 convicted criminals from prison during the COVID pandemic.
In 2021, Cooper and far-left groups announced a settlement agreement releasing a total of 3,500 convicted criminals from state prison. When Cooper’s settlement was announced, prison officials said only convicts with sentences ending in 2021 would be released. That declaration misled a state legislative committee, forcing officials to correct them at the time, indicating violent offenders would be released.
The list of specific offenders was shielded at the time and only released when it was confirmed that DeCarlos Brown, the man accused of murdering Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail system, was on the list.
Cooper has offered numerous excuses for releasing violent criminals from prison.
When Brown’s history became public, the campaign said it was a “lie,” pointing to Cooper’s “career prosecuting violent criminals and keeping thousands of them behind bars as attorney general, and signing tough on crime laws and stricter pretrial release bail policy as governor and pointed to Cooper’s 40-year tenure in public office.”
He then tried to pin the releases on federal prison releases in the Trump administration. Once that explanation fell apart, Cooper sought to blame prison officials, saying it was their determination of who was released.
Yet Cooper was the only governor in the country who signed a legally-binding agreement requiring their state to release prisoners.
What made North Carolina different was Cooper being a willing participant in the releases. States such as Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey saw judges order inmate releases, but many of those rulings were later blocked or overturned on appeal by those states’ Democrat governors. Cooper voluntarily agreed.
Among those released from state prisons were drug dealers, rapists, murderers, and child predators.
In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis resisted similar demands and highlighted that Cooper could have pursued a different legal path instead of settling in the case. While the ACLU ultimately prevailed with a consent decree with the state Department of Corrections, Polis’s opposition and continued litigation avoided a court-mandated quota system.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker never signed a contract guaranteeing or commanding a large-scale mass release of prisoners, keeping the control over population figures within executive discretion.
In New Jersey, the state’s legislature passed measures allowing mass releases where Cooper’s team admitted to misleading oversight from the North Carolina General Assembly.
Nearly half of the criminals Cooper released have gone on to reoffend. These violent offenders were responsible for the murder of 25 North Carolinians and over 600 violent felonies.
