Case Explained: NC Senate votes to find new ways to execute prisoners, make other legal changes in wake of Charlotte stabbing – Legal Perspective

A bill to bring back the death penalty in North Carolina — and to make it harder for people with histories of criminal behavior and mental illness to go back onto the street after being arrested — passed the state Senate Monday in a 28-8 vote after nearly every Democrat walked out in protest of what they said was the politicization of tragedy.

The wide-ranging crime-and-safety reforms, stuffed into House Bill 307, were made public Sunday night and sped through the state Senate on Monday. They came in the wake of a fatal stabbing of a 23-year-old woman on a Charlotte commuter train. Footage of the incident sparked national debate over public safety and mental health.

State lawmakers had originally said the bill’s details had been agreed upon by House and Senate before it was introduced. But the Senate introduced a potential roadblock Monday when the chamber’s leader, Phil Berger, proposed a surprise amendment seeking to reinstate the death penalty by finding methods other than lethal injection to execute convicted killers.

Berger told reporters after the vote that he believed GOP leaders in the state House were also on board with the change and that the bill should still move quickly through the other chamber; a vote is expected as soon as Tuesday. Berger said he’s not pleased that executions in North Carolina have been put on pause for nearly 20 years now, and that he believes public opinion is also on the side of restarting executions.

“This is something that’s been building for a while,” he said. “And the incident in Charlotte really has awakened a lot of folks — or at least has gotten folks more vocal — about their concerns about crime in North Carolina, and crime in the United States.”

Violent crime has been trending downward for decades; crime data shows Americans were twice as likely to be the victim of violent crime in the 1990s than they are today. Just last month a report by the FBI showed that violent crime had continued to drop in 2024. But public polling also shows Americans believe crime is on the rise, and voters often tell pollsters crime is a top concern of theirs.

Lethal injection is still allowed in North Carolina but hasn’t been used since 2006 due to lawsuits and advice from the state medical board that doctors may risk losing their license if they execute someone for the state. Berger’s plan would require Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s administration to find new ways of executing people that might not face similar problems.

Spokespeople for Stein didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday night.

Democrats in the Senate spoke out against the amendment, asking Berger if he’d prefer to hang people or put them in front of a firing squad, as they laid out their opposition to the plan.

“This is so disturbing and unnecessary,” said Sen. Kandie Smith, D-Pitt. “And for anybody else who’s willing to jump up and say, ‘I want to kill people, I’m willing to pull the trigger,’ that’s not a cool thing to do. If we truly care about justice and dignity, and about life, then we have to understand that it is not our job to find the most inhumane way to take someone’s life. And we call ourselves Christians.”

Sen. Carl Ford, R-Rowan, said he would be willing to be among those pulling the trigger on a firing squad. He also appeared to indicate that abortion should be added to the list of crimes eligible for the death penalty in North Carolina.

“Seventy-five innocent people are killed in the state every day, under the guise of health care,” Ford said. “We know it as abortion. Those are innocent people. Those are unborn children, babies. And when someone has committed a heinous crime, and there’s proof of it without shadow of a doubt? You can sign me up. I’ll pull the trigger.”

Democrats said they were taken aback by Berger’s amendment, saying it spoiled what had felt like bipartisan agreement over other proposals in the bill.

“Stop acting like Republicans and Democrats,” said Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, D-Mecklenburg. “Actually solve their problems and give them public safety, address the short shortcomings in our courts and our jails and our bail system. This bill doesn’t do that anymore. And I want you to think long and hard before you decide to vote yes, because I had intended to vote yes on this bill. I am deeply ashamed today.”

Other changes in the bill

The changes were proposed weeks after the fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska. She had fled from war in Ukraine and was killed in what appeared to be a random attack on a Charlotte 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.

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 awaiting trial on misdemeanor charges in a separate case when he was charged with killing Zarutska. He faces federal and state murder charges in the case. He previously pleaded guilty to armed robbery charges and served more than five in prison. A lawyer for Brown didn’t immediately respond to comment.

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.

Some critics raised concerns about pieces of the bill — that the stricter bail rules might pressure innocent people to take guilty pleas simply to get out of jail, or that it will funnel more people convicted of violent crimes into the state’s mental health hospitals without providing any extra funding to handle them.

Before the surpris death penalty amendment soured the mood between Democrats and Republicans, Mohammed, a former public defender, thanked Republicans for giving his home county more money for prosecutors. The bill funds 10 new prosecutors for Mecklenburg County.

But he also 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.”

He said he supported the bill as a whole, but he opposed naming it after Zarutska. Mohammed said that opposition was based on conversations he had with her mother and other family members. President Donald Trump and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley have seized on the killing, highlighting it as they seek to portray their political opponents as weak on crime.

“No family should ever have to see the face of their loved one turned into a political prop simply because a political consultant or a political operative thought this was a golden opportunity to exploit someone’s death,” Mohammed said. “No grieving mother should have to watch her child’s name flash across a campaign ad. No father should have to scroll through his phone only to find his child’s image used for someone’s political gain.”

He proposed an amendment to the bill, creating a new state law to ban the use of the name, image or likeness of deceased crime victims in political ads. The move took Republicans by surprise; they typically vote quickly to shoot down amendments proposed by Democrats but in this case his proposal sent Republicans scrambling for about an hour before the decided to shoot the amendment down.

‘Weak-on-crime policies’

After the Charlotte stabbing made national news, drawing a response from Trump in a White House address, the state legislature’s Republican leaders scrambled to show they’re reacting. Democrats, including 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,” 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 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.”

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.

In addition to the attempt to restart executions, the bill also proposes several other death penalty changes.

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. And it would 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.

Democrats, again, were troubled by that and pointed to cases in which innocent people have been sentenced to Death Row, only to be found innocent and exonerated, often decades later.

“There are innocent people in our country that are wrongfully convicted and sadly, at times, wrongfully executed,” Mohammed 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.”

Others also had separate quibbles with where the bill would or wouldn’t send funds.

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.