Speaker 1: What's going on?
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And again, thank you so much for your support. It's Tuesday,
it's twelve o'clock and that means it's done time. Andrew Dunn,
the contributing columnist over at Charlotte Observer. We don't hold
that against him, though, and the publisher of long Leave Politics.
Longleafpol dot com is the website. Subscribe as I do, Andrew,
how are you today, sir?
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm doing good. Done time. I might need to
trademark that.
Speaker 2: You can have it. It is my gift to you.
I'm thinking merch opportunities for you.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: Oh you know what you could also do? Be like,
I'm just so done. You could do something like that too,
Just so don't you like that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You could, man if I had a name like yours.
All I've got is like combinations with a calendar. That's
the only thing I can.
Speaker 3: Do that's nowhere near as fun.
Speaker 1: No, exactly.
Speaker 2: So all right, the North Carolina General Assembly back in session.
They resumed yesterday, and right out of the gate, they
introduced House Bill three oh seven. It's called Arena's Law,
named after the twenty three year old Ukrainian refugee Arena Zarutska.
Speaker 1: That was murdered on the Charlotte light rail car a
month ago.
Speaker 2: Yesterday, and you had written a piece over at Long
Leave Politics about what you wanted to see in the law.
So I guess, first off, did it check enough of
the boxes that you were hoping it would.
Speaker 3: It's a fantastic start, and I'm grateful that the General
Assembly is moving quickly on this. You know, the Senate
actually passed their version of it yesterday on their first
day back in session. I mean, it does a lot
of good things. You know, it ends cash list bail
for violent offenses. It's kind of amazing to me that
that wasn't already the case, but glad we're fixing it now.
Speaker 1: How did that even get in there? How did that?
Do you even know?
Speaker 2: How that became law? Was that part of the Republican
General Assembly list of bills that they passed and I
just missed it.
Speaker 3: I don't know how that became part of the law.
I mean my guess is that, you know, magistrates under
current law have a lot of latitude on what to do,
and you know, as far as I can tell from
existing law that it's kind of up to the superior
court judge in a particular area to set those rules.
So what the General Assembly is doing here is kind
of taking it up to the state level and setting
state statewide guidelines on that, which I think is clearly needed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So what else? What else do you
like about it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? A bunch of other stuff. You know, magistrates are
now going to be directed to take criminal history and
mental illness into account when deciding on pre trial release.
I mean, this is obviously big. You know, the gentleman
who was who's accused of murdering Arena Zaruska, was arrested,
you know, months before on a misuse of nine to
one to one charge. You know, that's a relatively minor,
low level offense. You know, you wouldn't expect to have
a really high level of bond just for that. But
if you look at the whole picture here, I mean
this person his own mother was begging for him to
be taken off the streets, and so this is you know,
this law is going to require magistrates to take stuff
like that into consideration when setting pre trial release. I mean,
those are the big ones. I think it's a great start.
There's a couple areas where I think it could go
even farther. The House is going to take it up.
Maybe they'll add a couple more and more things in there,
but you know, overall, I think it's a great start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are I think you mentioned I've got your
piece here at Long Leave Politics. You said you wanted
to go further, particularly for people with multiple violent priors,
and I guess part of this is and I was
talking to ap Dylan from the North State Journal yesterday,
and I guess at some point, though, unless you take
all of these decisions out of the hands of magistrates
and judges because you don't trust them, there it's going
to be difficult to sort of, you know, ferret out this,
for lack of a better term, soft on crime ideology.
Speaker 1: And I think that's that's the challenge.
Speaker 3: No, it is the challenge, and you know, there was
in the nineties a huge push towards you know, mandatory
sentencing laws, and there were three strike laws and since then,
you know, over the decades, those have been slowly eroded.
I do think we need to start pushing the pendulum
back in the other direction, you know, especially around people
who have been convicted of multiple crimes. I don't think
Arena's Law as currently proposed, does enough to really take
a stand that you know, at some point you just
got to be off the street, right.
Speaker 2: You also talk about the and I thought this is
long overdue as well, the additional prosecutors for the District
Attorney's office and a couple of it's like ten of them.
I believe it's ten das or assistant das, and I
think five legal assistants. So that's long overdue. Although I
heard it last night Charlotte City Council meeting. They were like, well,
then you need to add some public defenders too. What
do you think about that.
Speaker 3: I'm not as concerned about the public defenders, but what
I do think should also happen is we need some
more judges. I've been talking with some folks who are saying,
you know, you can have all the adas in the world,
but if you can't get your case in front of
a judge, then that becomes a bottleneck, and you know,
cases start to get stale, and you start to go
towards more plea agreements, which you know, we want some
of these more serious cases to go before a judge
as quick as possible, so I think we should look
at more superior court judges.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got a piece of long leave politics about
this very thing. Does Charlotte have enough judges? I was
not aware. I remember when the courthouse was approved. I
remember when they built it. I remember when it opened
with the big art display of the face the head
on the moving hanging pieces of metal and stuff, and
then it broke very quickly. But I never knew that
this thing was built in O seven and it had
an entire floor for expansion and that has never to
this day been expanded into This is.
Speaker 1: Like a whole floor for courtrooms. I was not aware
of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wasn't either, you know. Thankfully one of my
readers alerted me for this, and sure enough, if you
go to the Mecklimber County Courthouse website and look at
the floor map goes right from six to eight. You know,
there's no seven on the map because it's completely empty.
It's intended to house additional courtrooms, but there's no judges
for it, so they just haven't done anything with it yet.
Speaker 1: So it's a judge issue. They just don't have enough
of the judges, all right.
Speaker 2: So the politics, and you mentioned some of this in
your piece too, The politics of this is that if
you're going to add more judges, that means you're going
to add more Democrat judges. Because they're elected from the
local population. The local Democrat party controls the bar, as
they do in virtually every city and around the country.
So you're just going to add more Democrat judges. Is
that really a wise thing to do for Republicans?
Speaker 3: I think it is. I think, you know, there's not
really a great way to get around that. Would I
prefer to have a Republican judge in there, Yes, but
I would rather have a judge than no judge. And
I think that the tide is turning. You know, Democrats
are starting to get more serious about the crime issue.
I think Thomas Mills just had it yesterday. He's a
Democratic operative who runs a newsletter and he said it's
time for Democrats to get stronger on crime. Yeah, I'm
hearing good things from Governor Josh Stein. He wants to
get tougher on crime. So I think we gotta take
the risk and get more judges in there, no matter
what their party is.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, I welcome the democrats new found respect for funding
of law enforcement after uh, you know, five years or
so of rejecting that idea. Now, I did find this interesting.
Nick Craig, who is uh he's the host of the
Carolina Journal Radio Hour here on WBT five to six am.
He's down in Wilmington, and he cited a he pulled.
I was not able to watch this yesterday, the debate
in the Senate on Arena's law. But there was an
amendment run by Mohammed Majab I believe is his name,
and he's a senator from Mecklimbur County.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if you're aware of this.
Speaker 2: He wanted to run an amendment that would ban the
use of a deceased crime victim's name, image, or likeness
in political advertisements.
Speaker 1: Have you heard that?
Speaker 3: I had not heard that. That's kind of insane to me.
That's gonna go nowhere, so I'm not gonna worry too
much about it.
Speaker 2: Oh, you are correct, it did go absolutely nowhere. But
why on earth? Whatever do you think could be the
motivation for why a Democrat senator from Mecklenburg might not
want to be able to see or to have his
opponents use this kind of imagery in the upcoming campaign.
Like there are few things I have seen legislatively that
are as blatant as this, but this one, like this
is like a chef's kiss takes the cake moment here,
It's just obvious in its intent. He is so Democrats,
I think are very afraid of the way this is
going to be used against them, and I think think
that's why they're now sounding a different tune on the
crime issue, which again I'm fine, anything else on this
we didn't cover for you.
Speaker 3: No, I think that about covered it. I mean, the
big other thing that I really would love to see
in Arena's law is more benchmarks around how quickly cases
go from charge to trial. I think, you know, if
we add more adas, if we hopefully add more judges,
then I think we can have more clear accountability and
more guidelines. You know, we can't let these cases go
to three four years before trial because witnesses tend to
disappear and then charges get dropped, and we can't let
that happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, you're exactly right.
Speaker 2: The longer the cases go, the less likely you get
a condiction out of it.
Speaker 1: So Andrew Dunn always good to have you. I appreciate
your time in Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: All right, that's Andrew Dunn. You can catch his work
over at long Leaf Politics. That's long leafpol dot com.
And you can read him when he appears in the
Charlotte Observer on the editor pages as a contributing columnist.
All Right, you hear me talk a lot about incentives, right, Well,
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Visit incentive trip kit dot com because great trips deserve
even better returns. One of the one of the nuggets
or nuggets if you're from the Midwest, that from the
Andrew Dunn's peace over at Long Leave politics. There was
a breakdown in the number of judges per population back
in two thousand and six, so almost twenty years ago.
In Mecklinberg County, there were eight hundred thousand residents. And
those are not the inmates at the county lockup. As
Sheriff Gary not my fault McFadden likes to call them
instead of inmates, he calls them residents, but actual residents
you know of Mecklinberg County eight hundred thousand, twenty years
ago and there were seven Superior court judges, so that
works out to be a little bit more than one
judge per hundred thousand. Now we have one point two
million people, a fifty percent increase in our population, and
we have eight superior court judges, so now we are
under under one per hundred thousand, so we've lost ground.
We have a lower judge staffing level per one hundred
thousand population. And I agree with Andrew, I think it
does matter. I think that does have an impact. It
bogs down the system, he writes. When there's no credible
threat of a trial, plea negotiations fall apart, defendants don't
take deals, and the most serious charges often get watered
down or quietly dismissed, which, by the way, they never
send out. The DA's office never gives you the press
release on that. They never give you the press releases
on when they drop charges. And I know because I watch.
I keep an eye out for the press releases from
the DA's office, and they'll let us know when they
get a conviction or even an acquittal. I went over
some of this last week. But they never tell us
when they drop charges unless it's a very high profile case.
Speaker 1: I mentioned this also with Andrew.
Speaker 2: This is a hang on a second, I mentioned his
name and I want yeah, oh sorry, I think I'd
reversed his first and last name.
Speaker 1: Senator Mujaba Mohammad.
Speaker 2: He is a Charlotte Democrat, so his first name is
Mujaba and his last name is Mohammed. Senator Mohammad And
according to Nick Craig, he introduced an amendment to House
Bill three oh seven yesterday, otherwise known as Arena's Law,
and the title of it is use of a deceased
crime victim's name, image, or likeness in political advertisements. And
it would create a prohibition on the use of a
deceased crime victim's name, image, or likeness in political advertising.
Crime victims shall be treated with dignity and respect. It
is further declared to be the public safety policy of
the state. So they don't want any of the images
of Zarutzka's murder to be used in political ads against Democrats.
They are acutely aware of the problem that they have
on criminal justice as a topic. Voters do not trust
Democrats at the local level and at the state level,
and at the national level they pull terribly. Democrats do
among the general public and among voters pull terribly on
the criminal justice issue. And the fellow that used to
run the recruitment and gave campaign support for Republican candidates
for the State House, Stephen Wiley was his name. I
think he has since moved on to another gig, but
he did this for years. We've interviewed him on the
show a few times over those years. And the Black
Lives Matter riot, the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful
looting and rioting, that stuff did so much damage to
Democrats politically. They were signing on to just the most
insane radical platforms and pledges and stuff. At the height
of all this, they just got totally swept up in it.
Talk about social contagions, right, they were so swept up
in it they thought, this is our moment defund the police.
Speaker 1: They're just basically modern day slave patrols. And they were
all in.
Speaker 2: And cities burned, people got hurt, people got killed, businesses
got looted.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 2: They paid the price as they should have. Republicans used
that issue against them very effectively. And so that's what
Senator Muhammad was trying is he tried, he tried to
preempt but it went absolutely nowhere, which it's amazing to me, Like, dude,
you're in the minority in the state Senate. Why would
you even run a.
Speaker 1: Bill like that?
Speaker 2: Is the juice worth the squeeze for that? The best
spin you can get from that story is that you're
trying to protect the victim's family. That's the best spin
you can get. And the worst is what I'm doing
right now, is the fact that you're trying to insulate
yourself from the soft on crime policies, and so you
just want to basically engage in a censorship of your
political opponents so it doesn't harm your electoral prospects.
Speaker 1: It's just a terrible look for you.
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Tickets slash terms Limited time offer. Got a message, a
commun que from up in the Raleigh area, I'll call it.
I think Senator Mohammad's amendment was more of an effort
to minimize any any Willie Horton ads or the Willy
Hortoning of Anita Earls and Roy Cooper drawing direct lines
to the Racial Equity Justice Task Force whatever it was
called the Trek.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did not mean to intimate that the effort
to ban any images of crime victims in political advertising,
this ridiculous anti free speech amendment that Senator Muhammad attempted
to run. I did not mean to intimate that it
was only for his benefit. It was obviously for all Democrats,
And yeah, I think it definitely would have helped if
it had passed.
Speaker 1: It would have helped you prohibit the kind of.
Speaker 2: Although it would have been litigated and they would have lost,
because you can't stop somebody from making an ad on
YouTube that uses images of Arena Zerutzka's attack against Roy Cooper,
my good friend Ray and Anita Earls, who is the
Supreme Court judge running for reelection, who, by the way,
just did a series of fundraisers in Los Angeles and
San Francisco because nothing screams North Carolina values like San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2: Democrat party chair was posting this stuff to you know,
make sure you donate, buy your tickets and all of
this fundraiser in San Francisco and another one in Los
Angeles for Anita Earls. That's who we want to remain
on the Supreme Court of North Carolina.
Speaker 1: To be sure.
Speaker 2: Now, this builds the house built three oh seven Arena's law.
It did actually pass out of the Senate yesterday. It'll
be taken up today in the North Carolina House. Democrats
walked out of the vote.
Speaker 1: And it was pointed out to me.
Speaker 2: I saw this also when the so okay, so you know,
when you do an article, you're writing a piece for
the Charlotte Observer, the News and Observer rights same parent company,
and you put a picture at the top of the page,
right that goes with the article and a lot of
times this look media does this all the time. They
don't have an image from the exact event or something,
and so they just take what they call a stock photo.
Speaker 1: It's in their library, you know.
Speaker 2: Usually it'll be you know, like the image of the
State House or the seal of North Carolina from the
wall or whatever. They'll they'll they'll take just some stock photo.
And the stock photo that they used for their piece
about the Democrats walking out of this vote yesterday, it
was it was a bunch of inmates dressed in the
county orange jumpsuits walking down a hallway in a jail.
And I get it because it's about you know, criminal
justice bill and I don't know who made that decision.
But here's the problem is that the headline says Democrats
walk out of vote, and they're showing you this long
line of people that are in jail in their jumpsuits,
in the orange jumpsuits, walking down a hallway, and it
gives this impression that they're all Democrats, which is actually
it's actually probably kind of true. I kid, I kid
the Democrats. But here's the problem. When you share that
story on social media, the algorithms, the social media platforms,
they grab the photo that's attached to the article, and
so now this story and the headline is getting blasted
all over the place with the headline that Democrats are
walking out and all you see these inmates walking.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: I don't know why that makes me laugh so much,
but it does. I laughed at it when I first
saw it. It's just funny, Okay. It takes very little
to amuse me sometimes. So here's the story from Avi Badjpaie.
He is at the News and Observer, the McClatchy paper.
A Republican drafted crime bill introduced in response to the
fatal stabbing on Charlotte's light rail last month appeared to
have bipartisan support yesterday until an amendment prompted Democrats to
walk out. What was the amendment, Well, Senate Leader Phil
Berger introduced an amendment that would direct the North Carolina
Department of Adult Correction to implement alternative methods of execution
used in other states. If North Carolina's only legally allowed
method on the books right now, which is lethal injection,
if that's ruled by courts to be unconstitutional or was
otherwise unable to be administered. So again, for people who
may not be aware of this because you've recently, within
the last twenty years, moved to North Carolina. We do
not execute people in this state any longer. It's still
on the books, but we haven't done it since two
thousand and six. There was a whole bunch of litigation
and they said, you can't use the lethal injection because
it's cruel and unusual punishment because people suffer as they're
getting the drugs put in them to kill them whatever.
Speaker 1: And so there have been no executions.
Speaker 2: So what Phil Berger is saying, well, if we can't
use our method, then this amendment to the law would
allow any other method in any other state that has
been ruled constitutional to be allowable here. And what does
that mean electric chair and firing squad And so Democrats
walked out, which doesn't Actually that doesn't actually change the
vote because Republicans were still going to vote in favor
of this and pass Arena's law. So it passed anyway.
But you simply walked out. And so now you played
the role of coward. I understand if you want to
make the argument that you are again the death penalty,
and you are so against the death penalty that is
the law in North Carolina, that you're so against it
that you will vote against Arena's law. See but that
would require courage, which you lack. So you did not
actually stand up and vote for your principle that you
oppose the death penalty. Rather, you walked out to avoid
weighing in on the matter altogether, because you didn't want
to go on the record as opposing Arena's law because
you don't want that to be used against you in
your campaign.
Speaker 1: That's the politics of what happened.
Speaker 4: So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's,
and before he died, my mom and my dad took
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Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with
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Speaker 2: So going over the staff summary the Legislative Now Division
of the General Assembly, they do this for all of
these bills. They do in a summary of what the
bill would do, and a House Bill three zero seven,
called Arena's Law. It does a number of things for starters.
Before setting conditions of pre trial release, a judicial official,
a magistrate, or a judge must consider the factors provided
in state law, which include the nature of circumstances of
the offense, the defendant's family ties, financial resources, and mental condition,
and the defendant's record of convictions. So this law would
make some changes to that. First, a new definition of
a violent offense. They add in a bunch of other
types of offenses to give heightened scrutiny for pre trial
release for defendants charged with these or with a significant
criminal history. If a defendant is charged with a violent
offense and court records indicate that a defendant has been
involuntarily committed within the prior three years or charged with
any offense, and the judicial official has reasonable grounds to
believe the defendant is a danger to themselves or others,
the judicial official shall enter and order including all of
the following. You've got to require the defendant to get
an initial exam, Require the arresting officer to transport that
defendant too a hospital emergency room for the exam, Require
the examiner to petition for involuntary commitment, or provide written
notice to the court that there are no grounds to
file a petition for involuntary commitment. So people are going
to have to sign their names to stuff now to
say no, this guy wasn't a threat at all. Also,
if a defendant discharged with any violent offense, there would
be a rebuttable presumption that no condition of release would
reasonably assure the appearance of the defendant and the safety
of the community. You follow that, if they're charged with
a violent offense, there would be a rebuttable presumption that
no condition of release would reasonably assure the appearance of
the defendant. In other words, if this guy committed a
violent defense, he's probably not going to show up to court.
It can be rebutted, but that is a reasonable presumption.
For a first offense, a judicial official could determine to
release a defendant on a secured bond or house arrests
with electronic monitoring. For a second violent offense, the judicial
official could only release a defendant on house arrest with
electronic monitoring if available. So no more just letting them
walk out without monitoring.
Speaker 1: No, if they're not.
Speaker 2: Going to be held, they're going to be held at
their home. With a monitoring device. Convicted of three or
more offenses within the prior ten years, a judicial official
may only release the defendant of the under the conditions
of a secured bond or with house arrests with electronic monitoring. Finally,
the section would delete the condition of releasing a defendant
on a written promise to appear, so that's the cashless
bail process, so that goes away. Under this section, new
aggravating factor is added to the list, which is if
the if an offense is committed while in public transportation systems,
so if you're on the bus, you're on the train,
you do something illegal, you commit a violent act. That
is an aggravating factor, which then increases the sentencing protocols.
And also rules are to be created to address conflicts
of interest among magistrates. In addition to the chief district
judge of the district in which that magistrate is appointed,
the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can also suspend
a magistrate. So now there is another mechanism to get
some of these magistrates out of their posts when they're
making really terrible decisions. All right, that'll do it for
this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could
not do the show without your support and the support
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heard it here. You can also become a patron at
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thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.