NC’s executions stopped almost 20 years ago. Will they resume under Iryna’s Law?
After being convicted of murder and placed on North Carolina’s death row, Alfred Rivera managed to escape being executed in 1999.
He was granted a new trial, where a jury decided evidence proving his innocence was withheld from the first dozen individuals to pass down judgment that would have put him to death. But in the two years he spent on death row, Rivera had come to know the men around him who had also been sentenced to death — four of whom were executed.
“I remember these guys, I knew these guys, you know,” Rivera said during a Tuesday webinar hosted by the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “I consider these guys, you know, as friends and associates.”
North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since Aug. 18, 2006.
But nearly 20 years later, anti-death penalty advocates are worried that legislation signed into law last year — sparked by the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, on the Charlotte light rail — could see executions resume.
It took around six months for House Bill 307 to be filed, amended and signed into law by Gov. Josh Stein in 2025. The changes established a two-year deadline for post-conviction hearings — delaying any longer will require a written finding of “extraordinary circumstances.”
It also leaves the door open for the state to use any means deemed constitutional to carry out an execution. Death row inmates could face a firing squad or execution by nitrogen gas if lethal injection chemicals aren’t available.
The legislation “politicized the horrific murder of a woman,” NCCADP Executive Director Noel Nickle told The News & Observer in an interview, but “did nothing to keep us safe.”
“It did nothing to address the fundamental inadequacy of providing mental health care for people in need, providing robust reentry services when someone has been engaged with the criminal legal system,” Nickle said.
“And that’s where we need to be focusing our time and our financial resources, not figuring out how to execute people.”
Months before DeCarlos Brown Jr. stabbed Zartuska in Charlotte, he pleaded with police officers for help during a mental health crisis in which he was delusional, The Charlotte Observer reported last year. Instead, they arrested him for misusing 911 and a judge released him later that day on a written promise to appear.
No ‘failsafe’ executions
North Carolina law previously dictated that death row inmates be executed by lethal injection. But policymakers amended that legislation as part of Iryna’s Law. Now, the state can use any execution method that hasn’t been deemed unconstitutional, if lethal injection is “unavailable for any other reason,” according to HB307.
Nickle told The N&O she didn’t think anyone realized that Aug. 18, 2006, would be the last execution in the state. She said part of the reason the killings stopped was the method of execution.
Death by nitrogen gas-induced hypoxia or a firing squad could fill the gap that a lack of lethal injection chemicals left for the last two decades. If one method isn’t available, the state has 120 days to find another one.
“We have prisons that we can’t fully staff,” Nickle said. “And so now the Department of Corrections is going to be tasked with figuring out how to obtain execution methods?”
What’s more, executions don’t always go as planned. Nickle said no method of execution is completely failsafe.
Last year, a South Carolina firing squad executed Mikal Mahdi. But an autopsy report shows the shooters “largely missed” his heart, NPR reported.
And just last month, the state of Tennessee botched the execution of a death row inmate convicted of murder in 1994. State officials tried for over an hour to execute Tony Carruthers with a lethal injection, WLPN News, an NPR affiliate reported.
A law ‘without any plan’
HB307 also created a two-year deadline for the review “of all post conviction death penalty cases,” according to Nickle. For a judge to extend that period, it would take an extraordinary circumstance, according to the law.
Henderson Hill, the co-director of RedressNC and a civil rights and capital defense attorney, said it’s hard to place a two-year limit on something “that’s very complicated and has, you know, just decades and generations of the legal principles and precedents to follow.”
“It’s not easy to just sort of throw that two-year limit and expect even your friendly judges and DA’s to dance to that tune,” Hill said during the webinar.
Three capital post-conviction hearings were scheduled for late June in Wake County Superior Court, NCCADP said in a press release. Nickle told The N&O that to her knowledge they’re the first in the state since the legislation was passed.
She said while it was a “far more intentional response” than seen elsewhere, she is unsure that other areas of the state — without the resources Wake County has — will be able to adhere to those timelines.
That’s another unintended consequence, she said.
“The bill was written, the law was ratified without any plan for really how to make this happen in a thoughtful, intentional way,” Nickle said.
According to the NCCADP, 123 people remain under death sentences in North Carolina.
‘Continuity and not change’
Seth Kotch, an author and associate professor of American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, said there’s been a quiet shelving of the death penalty debate over the last 10 to 20 years.
“There’s not been a huge outcry, people have not been demanding safety with the death penalty,” Kotch said during the webinar.
It’s the same retreat courtrooms went into after an execution in 1961 — the last one until the 1970s.
“What changed in the early 1970s was the Supreme Court issued a number of decisions that Southerners were told were interfering with their way of life,” Kotch said. “Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion, a decision keeping prayer out of public schools, for instance.”
Kotch said a new narrative emerged that essentially started a “culture war.”
“I think we’ve seen that in recent months here as well,” Kotch said. “There’s been a long period of kind of placidity, people not necessarily feeling like their daily lives have gotten worse because we no longer have an operating death penalty, until a flash point allows opportunistic politicians to make changes to the law.”
The same cultural factors that led to culture wars in the Civil Rights era could be at play now, according to Hill.
“All the iconography of the KKK and racist tropes from long ago, that same vibe is what compelled Iryna’s Law,” Hill said during the webinar.
Opposition to the death penalty is nothing new, Kotch said. He cited a 1928 opinion piece published in The News & Observer that describes the policy as the “state’s death lottery.”
“While no one thing is absolutely certain to win the grand prize, the record shows that the best ticket a man can hold is that of being a white man,” C.J. Parker Jr. wrote in the piece. “Of the 92 victims of the electric chair only 13 of them have been white.”
The remaining 79 were Black men, Parker wrote. The piece also chided the newspaper for being “absolutely silent about” the first execution with the electric chair until just the day before it occurred.
“We’ve known about these basic constitutional issues, issues of fairness, for over 100 years, and well before then,” Kotch said. “Yet somehow we have continued using it and have continued allowing it to be used.”
He said “the story of the death penalty is one of continuity and not change.”
