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North Carolina legislators are hoping to make it harder for people with histories of criminal behavior and mental illness to go back onto the street after being arrested.
Those and other changes are in a bill proposed by state lawmakers, inspired by the fatal stabbing last month in Charlotte of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska. She had fled here from war in Ukraine and was killed in an apparently random attack on a commuter train. The bill was made public Sunday and is planned for debate in the legislature Monday, when the legislature will also be taking up bills on Medicaid funding, Hurricane Helene relief and more.
But amid the flurry of activity, GOP leaders are expected to focus heavily on the crime bill — which may also be one of few topics that leadership in both chambers agrees on.
“Iryna should still be alive,” state Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said. “She should be thriving and enjoying time with her family and friends.”
“North Carolinians deserve to live in safe communities without fear of violent criminals being cycled in and out of the justice system,” House Speaker Desin Hall said.
After the stabbing made national news, drawing a response from Republican President Donald Trump in a White House address, the state legislature’s Republican leaders have worked to show they’re reacting. Democrats, including Gov. Josh Stein, have weighed in as well, calling for more funding for police and mental health services.
The bill doesn’t provide any additional funding for police or for mental health services, but it would fund the creation of 10 new prosecutor jobs in Charlotte.
GOP leaders have attempted to lay much of the blame for the circumstances surrounding the killing on local Charlotte officials — who are mostly Democrats — rather than on shortcomings in state law, potentially because Republicans have been in charge of writing state laws for the last 14 years.
“We cannot let North Carolina be held hostage by woke, weak-on-crime policies,” Berger said.
The bill would eliminate cashless bail statewide in some circumstances and would make the jobs of magistrates — the unelected court officials who determine bail amounts in most cases — more susceptible to political pressure and oversight by adding Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, to the list of people with the power to fire local magistrates.
“This legislation eliminates dangerous cashless bail policies, holds magistrates accountable, sets a new standard requiring judicial officials to order mental health evaluations and, when necessary, involuntary commitment,” Hall said.
Many of the changes in the bill are based on the background of Decarlos Brown, a homeless man with a prior criminal history whose mother says has schizophrenia that she’s been unable to get him help for. He was charged with killing Zarutska. He faces federal and state murder charges in the case.
The bill wouldn’t immediately make it easier to commit people to mental hospitals, as Stein has called for, but it does order a broader study to be done on changes to the mental health system. And one immediate change it suggests would make it more likely that certain people would be committed involuntarily.
If someone has previously been committed and then later is accused of committing a crime, the bill would order the authorities to take that person to a mental hospital for guidance on whether they should be committed for treatment again.
The bill also doesn’t include any proposals that might make it more likely that North Carolina will restart executions, a longtime goal of some politicians. Berger had recently said he was looking into ways to resume the practice.
Lethal injections, currently the only authorized form of state-sponsored execution, have been put on hold in part due to lawsuits and advice from the state medical board that doctors may risk losing their license if they execute someone for the state.
Many Republicans in the state House earlier this year backed a bill to get around that by allowing for firing squads or the electric chair, but GOP leadership never allowed it up for a vote and that proposal isn’t included in this new bill, either.
The bill does make two other changes to death penalty rules, however.
One would make it easier for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in murders that occur on public transit, like police and prosecutors allege happened in the Zarutska case. And the bill would also make it harder for anyone who is sentenced to death to appeal their sentence or their conviction. It proposed stricter rules for the use of a legal filing called a motion for appropriate relief — which is also the tool that many wrongfully convicted people have used to be freed after proving their innocence.
The push for tougher criminal laws comes despite trends showing a steady drop in violent crime in North Carolina and nationwide. On top of that, one state lawmaker said Sunday, the focus on urban areas such as Charlotte is misplaced when law enforcment data indicates that the most dangerous places in North Carolina are all rural areas.
Rep. Rodney Pierce (D-Halifax) made that point in a letter sent to Stein and GOP leaders after the crime bill was made public Sunday.
“According to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s most recent data, the highest violent crime rates per 100,000 residents are not in Charlotte or Raleigh — but in rural counties such as Montgomery, Robeson, Scotland, Vance, Lenoir, Cumberland, Edgecombe, Beaufort, Northampton, and Richmond,” Pierce wrote. “These counties, including Northampton, which is in my own District 27, are too frequently on the frontlines of gun violence, domestic violence, and drug-related crime.”
Pierce said if the legislature truly wants to make the state safer, it should fund law enforcement and other public safety efforts everywhere.
“Our rural sheriffs’ departments and first responders are stretched thin,” he said. “If we’re serious about stopping crime across North Carolina, we must support every community — not just the ones near Raleigh or Charlotte.”
Health care, Helene proposals
Public safety won’t be the only topic up for debate at the legislature this week; health care and disaster relief funding will likely also receive substantial attention. But unlike the crime bill, GOP leaders don’t necessarily see eye to eye on those topics.
Senate Republicans rolled out a mini-budget proposal Sunday night with over $40 million more in funding for Hurricane Helene relief, ahead of its fast-approaching one-year anniversary, plus $15 million for Tropical Storm Chantal which hit central North Carolina in July.
The plan also includes $1.5 million for Raleigh-Durham International Airport to operate nonstop flights to Dublin through at least 2027; RDU announced just days ago that it would start such flights in 2026 through Irish airline Aer Lingus.
It’s unclear so far if House Republicans will go along with the Senate mini budget, which touches on a wide range of other issues as well. But one area the two chambers clearly disagree on is health care.
Two primary issues are at stake there: How to address underfunding in the state’s Medicaid program, and what to do with state support for a new children’s hospital, being built in partnership by Duke Health and UNC Health.
State lawmakers in 2023 approved giving that hospital project $320 million from state coffers. But as part of this year’s still-ongoing budget negotiations, House Republicans have sought to take back more than $100 million from that project while Senate Republicans strongly disagree, wanting to add in an extra half billion dollars.
On Sunday Senate Republicans indicated a willingness to negotiate, proposing the legislature simply return to the funding for the hospital they agreed to two years ago. That bill would also include about $690 for Medicaid.
The House plan, on the other hand, doesn’t give any indication that the chamber is proposing a change to its stance in favor of cutting just over $100 million from the children’s hospital. It also proposes adding that same amount to Medicaid beyond that the Senate has proposed, with $792 million in funds. It also proposes banning North Carolinians on Medicaid from receiving coverage for GLP-1 drugs if solely for weight-loss purposes.
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