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North Carolina legislators are pushing forward with changes to make it harder for people with histories of criminal behavior and mental illness to go back onto the street after being arrested.
The new version of House Bill 307 passed an initial committee hearing Monday, en route to what’s likely to be a swift passage in the state Senate followed by final approval in the state House later this week.
The bill would allow people with violent criminal histories, but who were deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, to be held in psychiatric hospitals longer. It would eliminate certain cashless bail policies and enact stricter bail guidelines for some alleged crimes. And it would make some tweaks to the rules for the death penalty, but it contains nothing that would appear to immediately restart executions in North Carolina, which have been on pause for nearly 20 years.
Those and other changes have been proposed by state lawmakers following 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.
“When we were looking at drafting this bill, a lot of it was looking at the situation that happened in Charlotte,” Sen. Danny Britt, R-Robeson, a criminal defense attorney who serves as one the legislature’s top authorities on criminal law issues, said Monday during the first committee hearing the bill cleared.
Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, D-Mecklenburg, thanked Republicans for giving his home county more money for prosecutors in the bill — it funds 10 new prosecutors for Mecklenburg County — but he said that won’t do much to speed up the local justice system if there’s no other additional funding for court clerks and public defenders, who are also needed to keep criminal cases moving along.
“Obviously, these positions are critically needed,” Mohammed said. “It’s great that we’re funding prosecutors. But if you only have prosecutors, the system’s still going to be slowed down.”
Sen. Dan Blue, D-Wake, noted that if this new passes Mecklenburg County will have about 40% more prosecutors than Wake County. The state’s two largest counties have roughly the same population, and Blue said Mecklenburg has nowhere near 40% more violent crime than Wake. Britt told Blue he understood where he was coming from but that Republicans in the state House are only willing to pay for more prosecutors in Charlotte, not Raleigh, so that’s what the bill proposes.
After the Charlotte 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.
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,” Senate leader Phil Berger said in a statement Sunday when the bill was first made public.
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.
Mohammed, a former public defender, raised concerns that some of the bill’s stricter new rules for bail would lead to innocent people pleading guilty to charges despite their innocence, just to be let out of jail.
“You’re probably going to see a lot of criminal defendants who are probably going to plead guilty just so they can get out and get time served, which is going to lead to more collateral consequences related to convictions,” he said. “I think there’s a better way. I know there’s been suggestions about more funding around mental health system.”
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. On Monday Sen. Sophia Chitlik, D-Durham, said she was in support of some individual measures in the bill but those death penalty rules would lose her support for the bill as a whole.
“I understand the desire to get justice for families who have been wronged and who need closure, and also just cannot support a bill that expedites the death penalty in our state,” she said. “We could save $11 million a year by eliminating the death penalty. We could deliver efficiency more quickly for families and justice. And I wish we would consider those solutions that are both efficient and compassionate.”
One of the changes 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. 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.
“These murder appeals are already going on too long, without a family ever seeing justice for their loved one,” Britt said.
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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