NC Attorney General candidates hold contentious race while fighting for similar goals

The two men facing off in the race for N.C. Attorney General come from similar backgrounds and have focused on similar issues, but that hasn’t kept the race from being contentious.

Democratic incumbent Josh Stein and his Republican challenger, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, both sought the position in 2016. O’Neill did not make it out of the GOP primary, losing to former state Sen. Buck Newton, who went on to lose to Stein.

Stein and O’Neill are both 54, both married and both have three children. Both were born and studied law outside North Carolina but have established track records of public service in the state.

The candidates

Born in Washington, D.C., Stein studied at Dartmouth College before taking a two-year break from school to teach English and economics in Zimbabwe.

From there he earned his law and public policy degrees from Harvard University.

In his first two jobs he worked to create affordable single-family homes out of abandoned drug houses in Durham and raised capital to invest in small businesses across the state.

Stein kicked off his political career as campaign manager and deputy chief of staff for U.S. Senator John Edwards.

Beginning in 2001, Stein worked for his predecessor, now-Gov. Roy Cooper, as senior deputy director over consumer protections.

In 2009, Stein began serving in the state Senate representing a portion of Wake County. He resigned early in March 2016 to focus on his run for attorney general.

Stein faced off against Newton, winning with 50.2% of the vote in the general election. He became the state’s 50th attorney general, succeeding Cooper, who ran for governor that year.

Meanwhile, O’Neill is in his third term as district attorney.

O’Neill was born in the Bronx but grew up on Long Island, New York. He attended Duke University and earned his law degree from New York Law School before starting in private practice.

He’s been with the Forsyth County District Attorney’s office for more than two decades. He became the county’s first assistant district attorney focused on domestic violence.

In 2009, his boss, former District Attorney Tom Keith, left a vacancy by retiring before the end of his term. Then-Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue appointed O’Neill to finish Keith’s term.

Forsyth County residents have chosen O’Neill to continue in that position every term since.

But now O’Neill is appealing to a larger audience that already knows Stein.

Stein takes on several issues

Stein made a name for himself by accomplishing more than most in his first term as attorney general.

Since 2017, Stein has taken on illegal robocallers, targeted scammers trying to harm North Carolina’s older population and confronted North Carolina’s opioid addiction by helping draft multiple laws and working with the Department of Health and Human Services to launch a public education campaign. He’s also gone after price gougers who preyed on North Carolinians hurt by natural disasters.

Stein has also led the charge in the fight against sexual predators, a topic that has become a point of contention between the two men.

When Stein took office in 2017, he asked every law enforcement agency in North Carolina to count how many untested sexual assault kits each agency had. The number was staggering: 15,000.

“Only then did I discover that there were more than 15,000 untested rape kits,” Stein said in an interview this month. “I was dismayed.”

In 2015, the federal government had launched the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative for states and cities across the country to get the kits tested. The initiative not only helped bring sexual assault suspects to justice but also bulked up the nation’s national database of DNA samples.

Stein received a $2 million grant in 2018 to have kits in North Carolina tested and tracked.

Earlier this campaign season, Stein launched a television commercial attacking O’Neill for allegedly leaving 1,500 sexual assault kits sitting on a shelf and “rapists on the streets.”

“Jim O’Neill cannot be our district attorney,” a woman in the commercial states.

The commercial upset O’Neill. His own campaign website touts his work with sexual assault cases.

And O’Neill adds that he had no control over the sexual assault kits. Stein told The News & Observer that it is not in O’Neill’s job description to fix the back log, but he said it wasn’t in his either. Stein said O’Neill should step up and be a leader.

“What we want as attorney general is someone who identifies and solves hard problems,” Stein said.

The commercial led one of Stein’s employees, William “Bill” Hart Sr., to resign. Hart, who was the sexual assault kit initiative site coordinator for the State Crime Lab, said he supported the commercial’s praise of Stein, but he felt that it wrongly targeted O’Neill and every other district attorney for something they had no control over.

North Carolina state law does not include district attorneys in the chain of custody for sexual assault kits.

The kits are supposed to go from the medical facility that administered the test to the local law enforcement agency and then to the State Crime Lab or a contracted lab and then back to law enforcement.

Hart added Wednesday morning that though the woman in the commercial is a sexual assault victim and advocate and has done “really good work,” it was wrong that Stein’s campaign didn’t disclose she also worked for him as a part-time contract worker.

“Not identifying her as an employee gave a false impression that she was an unbiased party,” Hart said.

Both claim support for, and from, police

O’Neill has accused Stein of being silent when it comes to defunding the police.

A demand to defund the police spread across the United States after the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who said he couldn’t breathe while an officer kept a knee on his neck during his arrest in Minneapolis.

Protests and riots broke out across the country, including in North Carolina’s major cities, calling for defunding police, among other things.

O’Neill said one of the reasons he is running for attorney general is because it’s the top law enforcement position in the state and that he supports North Carolina’s officers.

“I support the men and women of our state who wake up every morning to put on a bullet-proof vest,” O’Neill said. “They go out into the streets and into the dark to keep us from harm.”

O’Neill said these men and women never know if they’ll come home at the end of their shifts but they do it anyway.

“I believe our officers need an attorney general who will stand up with them and for them and support them,” O’Neill said.

He added that his support has gotten him endorsements from the state’s top law enforcement groups.

But Stein is also touting his support from law enforcement across the political spectrum and says he also is against defunding police.

“I do not believe we should defund the police,” Stein said. “Police play an important role in fighting violent crime, and we don’t want people taking the law into their own hands.”

But Stein said he would support police reforms. Those include increasing accountability and officers’ salaries “to make it a more attractive career for our best and brightest.”

Stein said he also fought against a movement by President Donald Trump’s administration to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this year, Stein filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court defending the act, saying it allows people to get the mental health care they need and helps officers focus on violent crimes instead trying to be health care workers.

Stein is also a leader, along with N.C. Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, of Gov. Roy Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. The group is working to bring equality to North Carolina’s justice system.

O’Neill helps opioid addicts in county jail

Like Stein, O’Neill has also taken on the opioid epidemic in his jurisdiction. He launched a program that helps inmates suffering from an opioid addiction to become clean.

“There are the people who commit the low-level crimes to try and feed their addiction,” O’Neill said, adding that those low-level offenders take up space in the jail.

O’Neill said he talked with different pharmaceutical companies about what was on the market that could stop the effects of opioids. He learned about an injectable non-narcotic that lasts 30 days to block opioids from working in the body.

O’Neill spoke with inmates about the medication and offered them a deal. If they took the medicine and stayed clean for two years he would dismiss their low level-charges.

So far, O’Neill has had a 100% success rate with 5 graduates, he said, and another program graduation ceremony happening this week.

O’Neill said it’s one of the programs that he will fight for at the state level regardless of whether he becomes attorney general.

“I’m just really grateful it has been as successful as it has,” O’Neill said.

Early voting began Thursday in North Carolina. Election Day is Nov. 3.

This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 11:27 AM.