NC lawmakers unanimously send two new criminal justice reforms to Gov. Cooper
Two criminal-justice reforms that, for months, had stalled at the North Carolina General Assembly have been revived in the wake of days of sustained Black Lives Matter protests around North Carolina. They could now become reality in a matter of days.
The state Senate finalized one bill Tuesday and the House of Representatives did the same for a second bill on Wednesday.
“This is just another concrete step of pushing North Carolina forward with criminal justice reform,” said Republican Sen. Danny Britt of Lumberton, one of the key backers of both bills, on Tuesday.
The two bills are the First Step Act and the Second Chance Act. Both bills passed unanimously in both the Republican-led House and Senate.
The Senate had passed slightly different versions of both bills last year. But they had gone nowhere in the House until recent weeks, after nationwide protests and public polling showing that most Americans support the protesters.
Now it’s up to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to decide whether to veto the bills or let them become law.
Expunging criminal records
The Second Chance Act, SB 562, contains numerous changes related to helping people expunge their criminal records — both for people who had charges against them dropped or, in some cases, for people who were convicted for nonviolent crimes but have since gone for years without getting in trouble again.
Lynn Burke got out of prison 20 years ago and has spent much of the time since then getting denied jobs and opportunities because of her record, she said. Burke was watching in person as the bill passed the House last week and again when it passed the Senate on Tuesday.
She’s excited that she’ll be able to get a clean slate, as long as Cooper signs the bill into law. She said she wants to be defined not by her criminal record, but by the things she’s done since getting out — like graduating from law school and raising children who never got in legal trouble of their own.
“I did like two years,” she said, tearing up in an interview Tuesday night. “But the two years have been following me around my whole life.”
First Step Act and drug crimes
The other bill, the First Step Act, won final approval in the House Wednesday.
That law would allow judges to disregard mandatory minimum rules when sentencing low-level drug offenders in certain cases. Britt said it doesn’t decriminalize any drugs but is meant to help people whom prosecutors can currently charge as drug traffickers, even if they never intended to sell any drugs.
He has previously said that right now it’s possible for someone to be charged with trafficking for having just six pain pills without a prescription. This bill wouldn’t change that. But it would give judges discretion to sentence someone to less than the mandatory minimum if, among other requirements, the person agrees to get substance-abuse treatment.
Britt said Tuesday that in the Senate chamber, he shares the desk that Cooper used to have when he was a state senator in the 1990s, before he became the attorney general and then governor.
From that desk, Britt said, Cooper personally sponsored many tough-on-crime drug bills that have since come to be seen as in need of reforms like the First Step Act.
“I want to be clear,” Britt said. “A vote for this conference report is a vote against many of Roy Cooper’s mandatory minimum policies.”
However, that dig at the governor didn’t stop Democrats from supporting the bill. It passed unanimously in the Senate Tuesday, then again, also unanimously, in the House on Wednesday.
Disproportionate punishments for Black people
Democrats have praised the Republican majority at the legislature for taking up these reforms, but some have also questioned why legislative leaders aren’t doing more.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Jeff Jackson of Charlotte said his Republican colleagues deserve a “sincere thanks” for passing the Second Chance Act, which he said is years overdue and will help tens of thousands of people every year.
“When we do something in a bipartisan way, that’s great,” Jackson said. “But when we do it unanimously that’s a clear signal that there’s more to do in that space.”
When the House took up the Second Chance Act last week, Democratic Rep. Ashton Clemmons of Greensboro also said there are numerous other criminal justice reform proposals, many with bipartisan support, that have never been allowed to come up for a vote.
“We have much, much more work to do,” she said.
Neither of the bills advancing at the General Assembly deals with police reform, which has been a frequent request of protesters.
Both aim to make the courts more fair, particularly for people who are either charged with a crime but never convicted, or who are convicted of nonviolent crimes. And there is much evidence that the criminal justice system tends to hand out disproportionate punishments for Black people.
N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, a Democrat who’s a Black woman, recently called on judges to do better in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
“In our courts, African-Americans are more harshly treated, more severely punished and more likely to be presumed guilty,” Beasley said.
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This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 7:02 PM with the headline "NC lawmakers unanimously send two new criminal justice reforms to Gov. Cooper."
