Josh Stein says ‘jail is not the right place.’ Right now, it is | Opinion

The United States is a nation of laws. That’s a beautiful thing worth protecting.

But it also means we’re a nation of lawyers. That’s not an insult, despite the easy joke. I have a lot of respect for legal practitioners.

Still, there’s a downside to living inside a culture of process. When the rules get complicated enough, common sense starts to sound like an amateur opinion, and the rest of us are left living with the consequences while being told we simply do not understand.

That is what North Carolina is wrestling with after the killing of Raleigh teacher Zoe Welsh. Once again, we are staring at a high-profile homicide involving a suspect with a long rap sheet and a long history of mental health problems. Once again, the public is asking questions the system has no good answer for.

Lawyers could spend hours explaining why Welsh’s alleged killer was out on the streets. In fact, they already have. They’ll cite Supreme Court decisions, constitutional limits, and fine print. They’ll tell you “incompetent” isn’t the same as “committable” under the proper justiciable standards.

They might be right on every technical point. The outcome would still be indefensible.

Because common sense says that if a court has decided someone is not competent to stand trial, he’s not competent to be roaming around the public freely.

The real world, not the ideal one

Gov. Josh Stein responded to Welsh’s death with a familiar line. He said that the system needs to do better, but that jail is not the right place for people in mental-health crises.

In an ideal world, he is right. The best answer is a secure psychiatric setting with serious doctors, fast evaluations, and a clear path to get the person healthy enough so the case can go back to court.

We should invest in that world, building more inpatient hospitals, hiring more evaluators and all the rest of it.

But we should also be honest about what happens in the meantime. North Carolina does not live in that ideal world yet, and I have a sneaking suspicion that even if we build more beds and hire more people, someone will still point to the backlog as the reason the hard decision could not be made in time.

So we have to govern for the world we are in.

What to consider

I may not be a lawyer, but this gap people keep pointing to is not hard to understand. A suspect is not supposed to be put on trial if he cannot understand the proceedings and assist in his own defense. That makes sense, even if the standard can be easier to meet than the public assumes.

Then we have laws that govern when a person can be committed to a mental health facility against his will. That bar is higher. The state has to show a clear, imminent danger. It is not hard to see how someone can slip between those two standards, especially when the system is strained and decisions get made in a hurry.

But as a state, we’ve allowed “incompetent to proceed” to become a magic phrase that dissolves all accountability. Even a layman can see that’s not workable.

So here is the rule North Carolina should adopt for cases like this. If a judge says someone is not competent for trial, that person does not go back on the street. He stays in custody until the court decides where he will be treated and what has to happen before the case can move forward. Not a shrug and a release because the system lacks a clean box.

Yes, the best place for that custody is a secure medical facility. But until North Carolina has the capacity to make that real, the fallback is jail.

Jail is not a hospital, but it has a clear purpose. It keeps people off the street when they are not safe to be on it.

Now the General Assembly has to do the hard part and turn that common-sense standard into legalese. The House Select Committee on Involuntary Commitment and Public Safety is already digging into the gaps, and Wake County Reps. Erin Paré and Mike Schietzelt have put this case squarely on the table.

They should come back with a law that closes this gap for good, and they should do it before the next family learns what our reams of laws failed to prevent.

Correction: The headline on an earlier version of this column did not accurately quote Gov. Josh Stein.

Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.

This story was originally published January 23, 2026 at 5:00 AM.