Setting the record straight on the connection between Roy Cooper and DeCarlos Brown | Opinion

Editor’s note: Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn wrote a Feb. 5 column on revelations about accused killer DeCarlos Brown, Jr. and their implications in Roy Cooper’s U.S. Senate Race. A correction from Dunn regarding that column:

I wrote a column Thursday morning about US Senate candidate and former governor Roy Cooper and his connection with DeCarlos Brown Jr., the man charged with murdering Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail train.

A lot of Republicans are saying that Cooper freed Brown early, and that simply isn’t true. He was already out of prison at the time that Cooper signed a 2021 court settlement with the NAACP that released North Carolina prisoners during the COVID pandemic. Whether somebody should serve less than six years for armed robbery is another discussion.

Anyway, I wrote about the connection between Brown and Cooper. I didn’t get it exactly right, and I want to explain. Bear with me, because it gets a little complicated.

Here are the undisputed facts

In 2021, the Cooper administration settled a lawsuit with left-wing activist groups who claimed unsafe conditions in state prisons during the pandemic. In the settlement agreement, the two sides professed the shared goal of “protecting incarcerated persons and mitigating the impact of COVID-19 in North Carolina state prisons.”

As part of the settlement, Cooper’s team said it would “effectuate the ‘early reentry’ of 3,500 persons.” For a lot of people, this meant setting them free from prison early. But it also counted if somebody was reinstated to parole earlier than they would have otherwise.

The settlement was signed on Feb. 25, 2021, but stipulated that people released starting Feb. 15, 2021, would count toward the total.

Brown, who was on parole for an earlier conviction, faced a parole hearing in Charlotte on Feb. 15, 2021. He’d been arrested the week before, so the parole hearing officer had the choice to either send him back to prison, or to restore him to parole.

Brown was restored to parole. Because of that decision and the timing of it, he got to count toward Cooper’s goal of freeing 3,500 people.

In my column, I wrote, “It seems obvious that the mid-February decision was made knowing the settlement was coming, and that keeping offenders free would count toward their quotas.”

With more information from other published reports, I recognize that this is implausible. The parole hearing officer who made the decision likely didn’t know that DeCarlos Brown would wind up as one number on a list of 3,500 people.

Following this timeline, it’s also unlikely that then-Governor Cooper proactively chose Brown out of a lineup of potential prospects for freedom. Instead, his team likely combed through the most recent parole decisions and threw his name on the list.

A few things remain true:

It’s true that nobody forced Cooper to enter into this settlement. Similar lawsuits were filed all around the country. States like Texas and Florida largely fought them off, and New York even took a pretty combative stance against setting people free.

But in North Carolina, the ACLU trumpeted that this settlement was “among the largest prison releases in the country achieved via COVID-19 litigation efforts.” The Cooper team describes this as a “court-ordered settlement,” but he could have fought it as other states did. He did not.

It’s also true that through the end of 2020 and into 2021, the Cooper administration had the explicit goal of reducing the number of people in prison. Cooper’s Department of Public Safety described a year-long effort of “expedited releases” as a COVID-era policy.

Also, in the 2021 statement announcing the settlement, Cooper’s Department of Public Safety had a lot to say about protecting inmates, and nothing to say about protecting the public.

The worst is yet to come?

It’s understandable why the NAACP settlement story would be troubling to Cooper. As part of the settlement, this list of offenders was to be kept from the public, and he likely thought never thought it would see the light of day.

But now it has, and there are 3,500 people who in some way, shape or form were let out of prison early because of Gov. Roy Cooper’s policy decision. I’m sure that analysts are combing through the list and mounting a tally of the crimes these people committed after being set free early.

So my larger point still stands. This is likely a game changer in Cooper’s U.S. Senate race.

Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He served as the communication director for Dan Forest in his 2020 run for governor of North Carolina. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.

This story was originally published February 5, 2026 at 11:22 AM.