The fatal stabbing on a Charlotte light-rail train last month has prompted calls for the revival of the death penalty in North Carolina.
North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger said Thursday he wants to undo a moratorium on the practice — a pause he blames on judges, doctors and elected officials “who are more interested in serving leftist political biases than justice for victims and their families.”
The push comes after a video of the gruesome attack spread across the nation. DeCarlos Brown Jr., a homeless man whose mother has said is schizophrenic, faces state and federal murder charges in the Aug. 22 incident. Investigators say he rose from his seat on a commuter train and slashed the neck of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, who had moved to Charlotte from war-torn Ukraine.
The person who killed her, President Donald Trump said in a social media post, should face a quick trial “and only [be] awarded the death penalty. There can be no other option.”
The death penalty hasn’t been repealed in North Carolina, but it also hasn’t been used in nearly 20 years.
Here’s what you need to know about capital punishment in the state.
What is state law regarding the death penalty?
State law allows the death penalty for people convicted of first-degree murder, if a jury is unanimous that death is warranted. Only one method — lethal injection — is currently allowed for executions. Despite the legality, the practice hasn’t been used in the state since 2006.
Who is on death row?
There are 120 men and two women on death row in North Carolina. They include 51 white prisoners, 62 Black prisoners and nine from other races and ethnicities. Most were convicted in the 1990s or early 2000s, but one man has been on death row since 1985. Two others arrived this year.
Why have executions stopped?
A series of court cases over the course of many decades have challenged different versions of North Carolina’s death penalty laws. For instance, a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down a state law that imposed mandatory death sentences for murder. That 5-4 ruling said juries should be able to decide.
More recently, other cases have alleged that many death penalty cases in North Carolina have been tainted by racial bias — sometimes by prosecutors, sometimes by juries — or that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.
Is it only a question for courts to debate?
No. Another reason no executions have been carried out is that there are no doctors able to administer the lethal injection drugs.
The North Carolina Medical Board has said executing people would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath that all doctors must swear, to “do no harm.” Any doctor who purposefully kills someone — even if it’s for the government, as part of an official execution — would risk the board revoking their license to practice medicine.
GOP lawmakers have since weighed whether to allow other forms of execution, including firing squads and the electric chair, and might now revive those plans.
What do opponents say?
Opponents of the death penalty say executions violate the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which bans “cruel and unusual punishments.” Critics also raise concerns about innocent people being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.
They also say it provides no real benefits to public safety. Executing people might satisfy a desire for revenge, but there’s no proof it deters crime, opponents say. Violent crime in the U.S. has been steadily dropping for decades, even as more and more states have also stopped executions.
“It will not increase public safety, it will not make law enforcement any safer, it will not decrease rates of homicide,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “None of those things will happen with strengthening the death penalty in our state, or resuming executions.”
Can state lawmakers actually restart it?
Republican legislative leaders say they can restart the death penalty, but details are lacking. Berger said at a news conference Thursday that he was looking into restarting the practice. When asked how he would go about doing that, Berger had no specifics to share. “We’ve not settled on exactly what is going to be in the package,” he said, referring to a crime-focused bill that he and House Speaker Destin Hall plan to file later this month. Hall, who was also at the news conference, didn’t respond to the question.
Republican politicians broadly support the death penalty and have also been in control of the state legislature for the past 14 years. If they think they can bring back the death penalty by passing a new law, it’s unclear why they wouldn’t have attempted to do so previously.
Berger and Hall didn’t address that during Thursday’s announcement of their forthcoming legislation.
Has the legislature tried doing anything before now?
Yes. Earlier this spring Republicans in the state House advanced a bill to allow North Carolina to kill people by firing squad or the electric chair. Since neither option would be as reliant on doctors as lethal injection, those could be ways to get around the difficulty of finding a doctor to administer a lethal injection.
House Bill 270 passed two committees in the House but in the end was never allowed to receive a vote on the House floor.
Bill sponsor Rep. David Willis (R-Union) said he and other backers wanted “to support those families who have long been awaiting justice and closure to the loss of loved ones by the folks that have been put on death row,” WRAL reported after one of the bill’s successful committee hearings in April.
Has the state used firing squads or the electric chair before?
Firing squads have never been an official state-sponsored form of execution in North Carolina. It’s possible they were used before 1910, when executions were carried out by local officials instead of the state government, but hangings were the most common form of execution back then.
After the state took over responsibility in 1910, executions shifted to the electric chair. The chair was used until the 1930s, when poison gas became the preferred method. Starting in the 1980s death row prisoners were allowed to choose whether they’d prefer gas or lethal injection. In 1998 the Democratic-controlled state legislature shut down the gas chamber at Central Prison, leaving lethal injection as the only method of execution.
How does North Carolina compare to other states?
Research from the Duke University School of Law shows that North Carolina juries are among the most aggressive in the country at sentencing people to death. Nearly all of the state’s 100 counties had at least one death penalty sentence between 1991 and 2019, which is true of only a few other states.
Even other socially conservative states — including Iowa, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, West Virginia and Kentucky — had few to no death penalty sentences in that period. North Carolina had dozens.
Forsyth County (Winston-Salem) led the way in sentencing people to death between 1991 and 2019, the Duke research shows, followed by Wake County (Raleigh), Cumberland County (Fayetteville), Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) and Buncombe County (Asheville).
Who’s responsible for the state’s death penalty moratorium?
The numerous court cases, the decision by the medical board, and the reluctance of state lawmakers to authorize other, more gruesome forms of execution have all played a part in executions ending in 2006 and failing to start back up since then.
On Thursday Berger also blamed Democratic politicians, including former Gov. Roy Cooper, who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2026. Cooper, however, supports the death penalty — a stance he held 20-plus years ago as attorney general and which he continues to hold as he runs for Senate.
Berger invited Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley to Thursday’s press conference, where they said Cooper deserved blame for the Charlotte stabbing as well as for the lack of executions in the state.
“For far too long, there’s been a judicially imposed moratorium on the death penalty by activist judges and doctors and attorneys general and governors who are more interested in serving leftist political bosses than justice for victims and their families and justice for the public as well,” Berger said.
The attorney general’s office is in charge of handling criminal appeals. Since nearly every death sentence is appealed, that means the attorney general’s office has the final say on how to handle them. And despite Berger’s claim of past attorneys general helping stop death sentences from being carried out, there’s no record of any North Carolina attorney general opposing the death penalty.
In more recent history, Cooper along with fellow Democrats Mike Easley and Josh Stein led the attorney general’s office from 1993 until 2025. All would also later go on to serve as governor. And all also supported the death penalty, using their position as attorney general to fight in court to keep convicts on death row. Executions were carried out under both Easley and Cooper; the moratorium had gone into place by the time Stein became attorney general in 2017.
Current Attorney General Jeff Jackson, also a Democrat, has likewise shown no sign of dropping any death penalty appeals during the first several months of his time in office. Jackson didn’t campaign on supporting the death penalty when he won election in 2024, but a spokeswoman for the state Department of Justice said Jackson will follow state law and defend death penalty convictions on appeal.
“Our office filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court last week defending a conviction in a death penalty case,” NCDOJ spokeswoman Nazneen Ahmed said. “We will continue to do so so long as the law remains unchanged.”
What was Cooper’s record as governor?
One power the governor does have over the prison system is his ability to pardon criminals or commute prison sentences.
On his last day as governor, Cooper commuted the sentences of 15 death row inmates. His office said 89 people had applied for clemency, and that while he rejected most of their claims, he did side with those 15 — in many cases because there was evidence of racial bias in their sentencing, or a possibility that they might have been wrongfully convicted.
Cooper didn’t release any of those 15 from prison. His commutations simply took them off of death row, re-sentencing them to life in prison without the chance for parole.
Have wrongfully convicted people been executed in North Carolina?
Most people think so. A 2019 poll by Public Policy Polling found that 70% of North Carolinians believe innocent people have likely been put to death by the state.
Starting in the early 2000s, the advent of new DNA testing technology has led to a wave of prisoners being proven innocent and released from prison — including a dozen men who had been on death row.
For many, subsequent reviews of their cases showed they had been wrongfully convicted due to police officers destroying or fabricating evidence, or due to forensic experts or eyewitnesses providing faulty testimony.
How do North Carolinians feel about the death penalty?
There’s little recent public polling on this question, perhaps because of the years-long moratorium.
The 2019 survey by Public Policy Polling also showed that North Carolina voters are generally skeptical of the death penalty. It found 57% believed racial bias likely plays a role in whether people are sentenced to death or not. And while nearly everyone agreed that murderers should be sent to prison for life, with no chance of parole, only 25% supported the death penalty.
The 2019 poll appeared to reflect the state as a whole: Of the people responding to that poll, 47% had voted for Trump for president in 2016, 45% had voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the remaining 8% either didn’t vote or had voted for someone else.
And even among Trump voters, that poll found, fewer than half supported the death penalty — just 42%.
