Backstory On Cooper’s Settlement To Release Criminals
Given the headlines about the Cooper administration’s collusive settlement with far-left groups to release convicted criminals early.
In March 2020, the world began to shut down in response to the fear of COVID-19. While most people focused on the impact on their kids’ school, job, and church, some advocacy groups began to raise concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on the prison population.
In April 8th, 2020, a coalition of liberal groups, including Emancipate NC and the ACLU of North Carolina, filed a lawsuit “to prevent the deadly spread of COVID-19 in the state’s prisons by reducing the number of people who are incarcerated in state facilities.” At the time, there were real concerns about the impact of Covid in prisons given the confined spaces.
During this time Cooper’s administration implemented ad hoc measures to mitigate the spread of COVID in prisons. The Prison Policy Initiative says that North Carolina had a prison population of 28,995. The data that was most recently updated in January 2022, from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services show that there were only 58 prisoner deaths caused by COVID. In fact, the Department of Public Safety struggled in 2021 to fully vaccinate the prison population.
In 2026, it’s plainly obvious that the doomsday scenario that many of us feared in March 2020 simply did not happen. This is especially true for the fear-mongering around the impact of the pandemic in prisons.
Since the apocalyptic predictions that were used to justify releasing thousands of prisoners failed to materialize, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit switched tactics to a tried-and-true strategy used by liberal activist and Democrat agencies to rewrite and ignore the laws passed by the People’s representatives in the legislature— collusive settlements. The definition of a collusive settlement is, “A collusive suit is a lawsuit where the parties are not genuinely in disagreement but instead cooperate to steer the court toward a predetermined outcome. These suits are not allowed in federal courts because they lack the true adversarial dispute necessary for judicial review.” These are highly unethical across the board in the American legal system.
In politics, the way this usually works is that a liberal activist group sues a Democrat-controlled state agency to draft a settlement that is signed off by a judge with ties to liberal politics, to effectively overwrite the law passed by the People’s representatives in a conservative legislature. A prime example of this type of misconduct happened in 2020, when the Democrat-controlled State Board of Elections entered into a settlement with a coalition of liberal groups to rewrite election law after voting had already begun, with rules that favored Democrat constituencies. Eventually, a federal judge intervened and stopped this action. But it clearly demonstrates how liberal leaning groups collude with Democrat-controlled state agencies to undermine the laws passed by the legislature.
The groups that filed the original lawsuit are a key part of the coalition that helped Governor Cooper in his electoral victories. Recent reporting from the Washington Examiner shows how a liberal dark money group pushed Cooper to oppose legislation that protected North Carolinians from the impacts of illegal immigration. It seems fair to assume that since Governor Cooper was politically aligned with these groups, he was pressuring the Department of Public Safety to placate them.
On February 25th, 2021, news broke that the Department of Public Safety and the coalition of far-left groups announced a settlement that paved the way for the “early release” of over 3,500 prisoners in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the ACLU press release about the settlement, this is among the largest prison releases in the country achieved via COVID-19 litigation efforts. At the end of the release, the ACLU highlights the policy goal of the organization, “The 3,500 early releases required under the settlement would be in addition to the approximately 16 percent reduction already achieved since the lawsuit was filed less than a year ago. The current population of 28,659 constitutes the lowest state prison population level since the enactment of Structured Sentencing in October 1994.”
The settlement failed to adjust to the new reality in February 2021, that the doomsday scenario first imagined in March 2020 failed to materialize, and the new COVID-19 vaccines would further mitigate the potential harm of the pandemic. More importantly, there were no provisions to prevent the release of violent offenders as part of the agreement, something that could have easily been added in as a condition.
As the ACLU press release indicates, the goal of the settlement was to accomplish the progressive goal of arbitrarily reducing the prison population under the guise of COVID-19 policy. Even more sinister, the settlement tried to impose an arbitrary cap on North Carolina’s prison population with this provision: “the governor’s office also agreed to monitor and control the prison population, pledging to further send people home early if they were scheduled to be released within 90 days when a prison population grew by more than 10%.”
The North Carolina Republican Party, under the leadership of NCGOP Chairman Michael Whatley, was the first to raise concerns about the public safety implications of this settlement.
From the NCGOP press release on February 25, 2021, “According the plaintiffs, the agreement marks one of the largest prisoner releases in the COVID-19 era, which is particularly concerning because the settlement lacks specific language to prohibit violent offenders and convicted sex offenders from getting an early release. ‘Governor Cooper’s incompetent management of the COVID-19 crisis risks turning a public health crisis into a public safety crisis,’ said NCGOP Communications Director.”
The Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly quickly jumped in to hold the Cooper administration accountable, at the first opportunity N.C. House Committee Chair asked DPS to “assure the North Carolina public” about the plan, and Department of Public Safety said categorically, “No one has been, is being released in this agreement that has committed a crime against a person in their current offense.” A crime against a person is a category that includes all violent crimes. But they later had to come back to the committee and clarify that the settlement would include individuals who had committed crimes against people.
After the immediate outcry about the agreement, insiders at the General Assembly continued to pursue more information about the settlement, but faced malicious incompetence and resistance from the Cooper administration regarding getting clarification on the settlement. For example, reporter Joe Bruno said that the department finally released the list to the media five years after the settlement was signed.
Tim’s Take: This issue is finally getting the attention it deserves, and the General Assembly is in a position to end the Cooper cover-up. For years, the Cooper and Stein administration have worked overtime to avoid accountability on criminal justice issues, as they weakened public safety to serve the interests of the dark money liberal groups they depend on to get elected. Ahead of the 2026 short session, Republican members of the General Assembly can hold the Democrat administration accountable both through legislative oversight and the power of the purse, both things fully within the purview of the General Assembly.
