Fleshing out Roy Cooper’s secret list
His “early reentry” list includes 51 convicts who had been sentenced to life in prison. That message can reach moderates.
I got myself into a little bit of trouble over my column in the Observer last week about the connection between former Gov. Roy Cooper and the man charged with murdering Iryna Zarutska. Sometimes you just have to live to fight another day, is all I’ll say.
Anyway, the main point of my column was that this “secret list” of early-release inmates is a big deal, and it’s only going to get worse for the former governor. That is still true.
A lot of Republicans’ early talking points were about how “Roy Cooper let DeCarlos Brown out early.” Technically, that is not true, and thus we get this credulous, hyper-legalistic “fact-check” from the news side of the media.
The link between the Charlotte light rail murder suspect and Cooper turns out to be relatively weak. I fear that the Cooper team is going to use that fact — and Republicans’ tendencies to get too far out over their skis — to dodge accountability for reckless policy yet again.
But there’s so much more to the story that will come out over the coming months. Hopefully. Here’s why.
Let’s talk about the list
Before I get too far into the weeds here, I have to acknowledge that this feels a little weird for me. I don’t usually write this way anymore. I’m rarely this explicitly partisan these days. Not because I’m squeamish about it, but it’s just not really my role right now. There will likely come a time again when I do need to go that route to further my goal of bettering North Carolina, but that day is not today.
Except when it comes to Roy Cooper. I wrote at length about why a few months ago.
So yes, between now and November I’m going to talk a decent bit about how to campaign against Cooper. Not with lazy talking points, but facts that hold up. OK, here goes.
You probably know by now that this whole scandal relates to a 2021 settlement1 between Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration and a coalition of left-wing groups who sued the state alleging that prison conditions were too unsafe due to COVID.
In the settlement (which you can read here), Cooper’s team agreed to “effectuate the ‘early reentry’” of 3,500 prisoners. They also agreed to provide monthly documents listing all the people they gave “early reentry” to in order to comply. The settlement stipulated that these lists would be kept private, and they were secret until last week.
Sen. Phil Berger obtained the first page of these documents, and that’s the one that listed DeCarlos Brown, the Charlotte murder suspect. That’s what started this whole thing.
As much as the Cooper campaign wants to insist that Brown’s freedom had nothing to do with the settlement, that’s not what the administration represented at the time. The Cooper administration itself claimed in these documents that Brown’s parole was part of the settlement.
Cooper may say now that they’re not connected, but that’s not what he told the NAACP’s attorneys. I’m still waiting to hear from the NAACP, by the way.
Because of all that, I think it’s fair game for Michael Whatley and national Republican groups to make an issue out of this specific name appearing on the list.
It is valid. But it’s not the strongest line of attack.
51 “lifers” are on the early release list
The other 3,499 names on this list are likely to yield a more damaging narrative for Cooper. While Berger’s team got the first page of this list and touched off the frenzy, I have to give kudos to WSOC-TV reporter Joe Bruno for getting the full list, which you can see here.
This makes it possible to go through the full list to match up the offender ID numbers with the actual people they refer to. It’s a big job, so I’m starting small: with the people who had been sentenced to life in prison.
Cooper’s “secret list” of inmates he claims were released early includes 51 people who had been sentenced to life in prison.
I’ve gone through each one of them to get their name, their primary charge, and their release date. You can view the spreadsheet here.
These are based on offender IDs in the WSOC-TV documents and available public records; if you spot an error, tell me and I’ll correct it.
Here’s how many offenders were charged with the following crimes:
First-degree murder: 19
Second-degree murder: 16
First-degree rape: 11
My spreadsheet also includes media coverage of these offenders and legal documents I’ve been able to find that detail the crimes. There’s some pretty horrific stuff in there, but I’ll give just one example here that illustrates the point well.
Tony D. Hartsell was convicted of first-degree murder in 1995 for beating and stabbing to death his 84-year-old neighbor in Gaston County. She was strangled, beaten unrecognizable and stabbed 44 times, according to news accounts. Hartsell was found guilty of murder, but the jury deadlocked on whether to impose the death penalty, so he was given life in prison.
Hartsell was denied parole in 2014 and 2017. Only after Cooper’s settlement did things change. In March 2021, Hartsell was granted parole and set free — and became an “early release” on Cooper’s list.
The jury foreman was aghast that Hartsell was set free. She told Charlotte’s FOX46 that the jury believed a life sentence meant he would die in prison, which was one of the reasons why they did not all go for the death penalty.
“He’s a violent man and it was a senseless killing and he shouldn’t be able to walk free. He should never be able to walk free and we need to be protected and society needs to be protected from somebody like this,” the victim’s niece told FOX46 at the time. She had appeared at every parole hearing to fight his release.
This is a pretty clear-cut case of a murderer who only got released from prison because of Cooper’s settlement.
How Cooper will likely respond
There’s always nuance, and this lifer list is no exception.
Other examples on Cooper’s list of lifers are less certain. In a few cases, Department of Corrections records show the offenders still in prison, so it’s unclear why they would be on the early-release list. In a few other cases, it appears they were granted parole earlier and given a release date later in 2021. Cooper’s settlement only bumped up their release by a few months; they would have been set free anyway.
But for most of the lifers on this list, it appears that Cooper’s get-out-of-jail-free card was the only way they were likely to get out.
The second point the Cooper team will raise is that most of the cases involved murders and rapes that occurred prior to 1994, when the law was changed to make it clear that a life sentence actually meant life.
Under pre-1994 North Carolina law, people with life sentences became eligible for parole after 25 years. I’ve already heard some Cooper apologists point this out and imply that there was no choice but to set them free. That, also, is not true. “Eligible for parole” does not mean they have to be released.
Another factor they’ll cite is that it was the state parole commission, not Cooper himself, that ultimately granted them freedom. This does not diminish Cooper’s responsibility here. The parole commission is under the control of the governor. The governor appoints their members, and they serve at the pleasure of the governor. The governor is ultimately responsible for their actions.
And the parole commission’s decisions are not made in a vacuum. They knew there was a settlement and that Governor Cooper’s policy preference was to set people free. These “lifers” were granted parole after Cooper gave them every incentive to set them free.
Also, to reiterate, every single inmate on this list is fair game. Cooper put them on the “early release” list. Whether they actually got out early or not, that’s still relevant. These are people that Roy Cooper decided were worthy of getting out of prison early.
Help flesh out the rest of the list
I hope that organizations with deeper pockets than mine are already combing through the rest of the list in a methodical way, but I can’t be entirely sure. I also don’t necessarily trust them to do it the right way.
It’s absolutely vital to have the facts 100% accurate. If I had the money, I would hire researchers to compile a spreadsheet for all 3,500 similar to the one I did for the lifers.
I want to know the names, charges, projected release date and actual release date for each of the members of Cooper’s secret list. And I want to know how many of them went on to commit more crimes.
I don’t yet have the subscriber base to fund this sort of work. If this is something you’d like to see, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Making the case to moderates
Just the information we have already has enraged conservatives, as the reaction to my posts on X clearly show. But we’re not the ones who ultimately need to be convinced.
Cooper still enjoys relatively high approval ratings and a significant advantage among unaffiliated voters. It’s the “normies” the messaging here needs to convince.
I imagine that DeCarlos Brown will appear in attack ads against Cooper in the U.S. Senate race, and that’s fine. I just am not convinced that it will be effective.
If more clear-cut examples come to light of inmates released early who went on to commit more crimes, that will likely be more powerful. But in the meantime, I think this “lifer” list is already decent fodder for a message to moderates.
Cooper likes to portray himself as a reasonable, centrist politician. He brags about spending his career prosecuting criminals and keeping bad guys in jail. This list provides direct evidence that isn’t the case.
For most of North Carolina history, governors have worked to keep people in prison to serve their sentences.
“Like most of my fellow North Carolinians, I believe life should mean life, and even if a life sentence is defined as 80 years, getting out after only 35 is simply unacceptable,” then-Gov. Bev Perdue, a fellow Democrat, said in a similar situation in 2009.
Roy Cooper took the opposite approach. He agreed to set 3,500 inmates free when he did not have to. His administration did not fight to protect public safety as his predecessors have done. He proactively pushed to free people on life sentences with no compelling reason to do so.
Then his administration misled lawmakers and said that only nonviolent offenders were being released.
Does North Carolina really want to give control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats like that?
That’s the makings of a pretty powerful message.
There’s debate on whether this was a “collusive” settlement, which refers to circumstances where left-wing activist groups sue the Democratic governor of North Carolina, who is friendly to their causes. They use this lawsuit as a way to arrange a “settlement” that achieves their policy goals without having to worry about the law. If a Democrat judge signs off on it, they’re all golden. The Cooper campaign team is trying to paint this settlement as something forced on them, but I tend to believe it was more collusive than not.