Roy Cooper pushes back against criticism of his record on crime
The North Carolina Senate candidate says ads attacking his record as governor are false.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper is pushing back against a wave of opposition ads attacking him over his record on crime. Cooper served as North Carolina’s governor from 2017 to 2025.
In April 2020, the ACLU of North Carolina, the NC NAACP, Disability Rights North Carolina and several incarcerated people sued Cooper and other state officials in Wake County Superior Court, arguing that overcrowded conditions in state prisons during COVID-19 violated inmates’ constitutional rights. A judge sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the state to reduce the prison population.
Nearly a year later, as part of a settlement, the state agreed to release at least 3,500 people within 180 days, through a mix of sentence credits, home confinement and parole. The ACLU’s announcement of the settlement called it “among the largest prison releases in the country achieved via COVID-19 litigation efforts.”
Two ads funded by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC that supports Republican Senate candidates, attempt to tie Cooper and the 2021 court settlement to unrelated crimes. Independent fact checks by FactCheck.org and PolitiFact found that the cases cited in the ads involved crimes that were not committed by people released as part of the settlement.
One of the two widely circulated ads features the father of a South Carolina murder victim saying: “It was a home invasion. Went to the house where Logan was sleeping and he pulled her out of bed and forced her on her knees and stuck a shotgun in her, left side of her chest, and pulled the trigger for no reason. Logan was a casualty of an agenda. Roy Cooper let 3,500 criminals out on the street; 18 of them were murderers. Forty years of Roy Cooper is enough.”
As FactCheck.org reported, Logan was visiting South Carolina when she was murdered, and the man charged for her murder had not been incarcerated in North Carolina.
A parent featured in the second ad told PolitiFact that he thought he was being interviewed for an anti-gun violence ad and said he didn’t intend to imply his son’s killer had been released as part of the settlement.
In a Facebook video, Cooper pointed out that Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate nominee, appointed a sex offender to leadership positions in the state Republican Party while he was the party’s chair.
The Asheville Watchdog reported that Whatley, who chaired the state GOP from 2019 to 2024, put Harvey L. West Jr. on the party’s Plan of Organization Committee. West pleaded guilty in 2000 to charges involving three underage girls and served six years in prison before being placed on the state sex offender registry for a decade. Whatley’s campaign has not directly addressed the appointment.
