UNC might require prints

Slayings in '04 prompt a Senate bill designed to check if students have a criminal past

Heading to a UNC campus next year? This could be your off-to-college checklist: Buy a computer, find a cool backpack and get fingerprinted.

A bill filed Thursday in the state Senate would require fingerprinting and criminal background checks for all students before they enroll in any of the state's 16 public universities, starting in the fall of 2007.

The bill's future is unclear, but it was sent to a legislative finance committee for consideration.

The proposal, by Raleigh Republican Sen. Neal Hunt, was prompted by two slayings at UNC-Wilmington in 2004, when female students were stalked and killed by fellow students with troubled pasts.

In the separate cases, the suspects' violent histories were concealed when they applied for admission. Last week, the family of one of the victims, Jessica Lee Faulkner of Cary, filed wrongful death lawsuits against the UNC system and the killer's father.

Hunt, whose business experience includes apartment management, said it is common for apartment complexes to run criminal checks on tenants. Why should a university be different, he asked.

"I think it would be a valuable thing for universities to do," he said. "It will be kind of cumbersome, but I think it's valuable information."

It is rare for universities to do criminal checks on prospective students. After the UNC-W killings, the UNC system considered widespread background checks but rejected the idea because of the expense and intrusion.

But UNC did change its admissions procedures. All prospective students are now asked about their criminal records, and they are scrutinized for gaps in their school histories. If red flags arise, a campus can do a criminal check.

Zack Wynne, who was student body president at UNC-W at the time of the slayings, predicted that students wouldn't like the bill.

"I don't have anything to hide, and 99.9 percent of us have nothing to hide, but the fingerprinting seems a little excessive," said Wynne, now a graduate student at Appalachian State University.

Others say the proposal should at least be studied.

"It will certainly get a fair hearing," said Sen. Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat. "If you can do it without a great deal of expense and without unduly burdening people, I don't see why we wouldn't do it."

The idea could win praise from parents worried about their children in dormitories with strangers, said Thom Goolsby, a Wilmington lawyer who represents Faulkner's family. Faulkner died at 18 in a dorm room after she was hit over the head, injected with a painkiller, sexually assaulted and strangled.

"I sure don't think it's too much to ask," Goolsby said of the background checks.

Goolsby last week sued UNC and James E. Dixon III, the father of Curtis Dixon, the accused killer of Faulkner.

Curtis Dixon, who committed suicide in jail, had left two other UNC campuses after incidents of fighting and stalking a female student. His father, a former assistant to the chancellor at UNC-Charlotte, pleaded guilty to common-law forgery for submitting his son's application that withheld Curtis Dixon's school background and dishonorable discharge from the Navy.

Hunt's bill calls for fingerprints to be sent to the State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI for criminal checks. Prospective students could be charged a fee for the service and could have their prints taken at local law enforcement agencies, the bill said.

Criminal checks would be costly and probably wouldn't reveal much, said Leslie Winner, vice president and general counsel for the UNC system. Because juvenile records are sealed, a background check of an 18-year-old would capture at most two years of behavior.

That is why the UNC system dropped the idea, she said.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke University, said a criminal check does not raise a constitutional problem -- after all, criminal records are public. But, he said, "telling people they have to get fingerprinted before they go to college -- that's much more likely to raise opposition."