Former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper released 3,500 dangerous criminals from state prisons in February 2021 because the ACLU and NAACP told him COVID was too scary for inmates — and now the data is in. Nearly half of them reoffended. Eighteen have been charged with murder. And Republican lawmakers have finally launched the investigation that should have started five years ago.
Eighteen murders. Not shoplifting. Not jaywalking. Eighteen human beings are dead because a Democrat governor decided that convicted felons needed to be protected from a respiratory virus. Give that man a humanitarian award.
The numbers come from a 2024 report by the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, and they're even uglier than the headline suggests. Of the 3,500 inmates Cooper's administration cut loose — as part of a settlement with the ACLU and NAACP, who claimed the pandemic posed an unacceptable risk to prisoners — a staggering 48% have been rearrested. Over 600 have been charged with serious felonies. More than 80 face new sex offense charges. One Republican lawmaker called the findings "worse than we thought."
Worse than we thought. That's the understatement of the decade.
Take Tyrell Brace. He was 29 years old when Cooper's administration decided he deserved early freedom in July 2021. By January 29, 2022 — barely six months later — Brace had been charged with murder. His victim was Elante' Thompson, a 23-year-old with a 6-year-old daughter who will now grow up without her father.
Elante's mother, Debra Thompson, put it as plainly as anyone could. "Why would you release somebody like that?" she asked. "They're already showing they're a gangster to society."
Good question, Debra. The answer, of course, is that Roy Cooper cared more about looking compassionate for the cameras than about whether the people he was releasing would go on to destroy innocent lives. The ACLU wrote him a letter. The NAACP applied the pressure. And Cooper folded like a cheap suit because that's what Democrat governors do — they serve their activist donors, not their citizens.
Now North Carolina House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate President Phil Berger have launched a formal legislative subcommittee investigation into the disaster. It's about time. Every single one of those 18 murder charges is a receipt with Roy Cooper's signature on it. Every one of those 80-plus sex offense charges is a direct consequence of a policy that prioritized inmate comfort over public safety.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, the settlement that led to the mass release was negotiated between Cooper's administration and civil rights organizations who argued — with straight faces — that keeping convicted criminals in prison during a pandemic was a civil rights violation. Never mind the civil rights of the people those criminals would go on to victimize. Those don't count in the progressive calculus.
We told you so. We said it in 2021. We said letting criminals out of prison because of COVID was insane. We said people would die. And people did die — 18 of them, at minimum, murdered by individuals the state of North Carolina chose to set free.
Roy Cooper has blood on his hands. The investigation is just the beginning. Every victim deserves an answer, and "but COVID" isn't going to cut it.
