NC Senate advances criminal justice reforms in wake of train murder (09-23-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. It's Tuesday, it's twelve o'clock and that means it's done time. Andrew Dunn, the contributing columnist over at Charlotte Observer. We don't hold that against him, though, and the publisher of long Leave Politics. Longleafpol dot com is the website. Subscribe as I do, Andrew, how are you today, sir? Oh, I'm doing good. Done time. I might need to trademark that. You can have it. It is my gift to you. I'm thinking merch opportunities for you. Oh absolutely. Oh you know what you could also do? Be like, I'm just so done. You could do something like that too, Just so don't you like that? Yeah? You could, man if I had a name like yours. All I've got is like combinations with a calendar. That's the only thing I can. Do that's nowhere near as fun. No, exactly. So all right, the North Carolina General Assembly back in session. They resumed yesterday, and right out of the gate, they introduced House Bill three oh seven. It's called Arena's Law, named after the twenty three year old Ukrainian refugee Arena Zarutska. That was murdered on the Charlotte light rail car a month ago. Yesterday, and you had written a piece over at Long Leave Politics about what you wanted to see in the law. So I guess, first off, did it check enough of the boxes that you were hoping it would. It's a fantastic start, and I'm grateful that the General Assembly is moving quickly on this. You know, the Senate actually passed their version of it yesterday on their first day back in session. I mean, it does a lot of good things. You know, it ends cash list bail for violent offenses. It's kind of amazing to me that that wasn't already the case, but glad we're fixing it now. How did that even get in there? How did that? Do you even know? How that became law? Was that part of the Republican General Assembly list of bills that they passed and I just missed it. I don't know how that became part of the law. I mean my guess is that, you know, magistrates under current law have a lot of latitude on what to do, and you know, as far as I can tell from existing law that it's kind of up to the superior court judge in a particular area to set those rules. So what the General Assembly is doing here is kind of taking it up to the state level and setting state statewide guidelines on that, which I think is clearly needed. Yeah, all right, So what else? What else do you like about it? Yeah? A bunch of other stuff. You know, magistrates are now going to be directed to take criminal history and mental illness into account when deciding on pre trial release. I mean, this is obviously big. You know, the gentleman who was who's accused of murdering Arena Zaruska, was arrested, you know, months before on a misuse of nine to one to one charge. You know, that's a relatively minor, low level offense. You know, you wouldn't expect to have a really high level of bond just for that. But if you look at the whole picture here, I mean this person his own mother was begging for him to be taken off the streets, and so this is you know, this law is going to require magistrates to take stuff like that into consideration when setting pre trial release. I mean, those are the big ones. I think it's a great start. There's a couple areas where I think it could go even farther. The House is going to take it up. Maybe they'll add a couple more and more things in there, but you know, overall, I think it's a great start. Yeah, there are I think you mentioned I've got your piece here at Long Leave Politics. You said you wanted to go further, particularly for people with multiple violent priors, and I guess part of this is and I was talking to ap Dylan from the North State Journal yesterday, and I guess at some point, though, unless you take all of these decisions out of the hands of magistrates and judges because you don't trust them, there it's going to be difficult to sort of, you know, ferret out this, for lack of a better term, soft on crime ideology. And I think that's that's the challenge. No, it is the challenge, and you know, there was in the nineties a huge push towards you know, mandatory sentencing laws, and there were three strike laws and since then, you know, over the decades, those have been slowly eroded. I do think we need to start pushing the pendulum back in the other direction, you know, especially around people who have been convicted of multiple crimes. I don't think Arena's Law as currently proposed, does enough to really take a stand that you know, at some point you just got to be off the street, right. You also talk about the and I thought this is long overdue as well, the additional prosecutors for the District Attorney's office and a couple of it's like ten of them. I believe it's ten das or assistant das, and I think five legal assistants. So that's long overdue. Although I heard it last night Charlotte City Council meeting. They were like, well, then you need to add some public defenders too. What do you think about that. I'm not as concerned about the public defenders, but what I do think should also happen is we need some more judges. I've been talking with some folks who are saying, you know, you can have all the adas in the world, but if you can't get your case in front of a judge, then that becomes a bottleneck, and you know, cases start to get stale, and you start to go towards more plea agreements, which you know, we want some of these more serious cases to go before a judge as quick as possible, so I think we should look at more superior court judges. Yeah, you've got a piece of long leave politics about this very thing. Does Charlotte have enough judges? I was not aware. I remember when the courthouse was approved. I remember when they built it. I remember when it opened with the big art display of the face the head on the moving hanging pieces of metal and stuff, and then it broke very quickly. But I never knew that this thing was built in O seven and it had an entire floor for expansion and that has never to this day been expanded into This is. Like a whole floor for courtrooms. I was not aware of this. Yeah, I wasn't either, you know. Thankfully one of my readers alerted me for this, and sure enough, if you go to the Mecklimber County Courthouse website and look at the floor map goes right from six to eight. You know, there's no seven on the map because it's completely empty. It's intended to house additional courtrooms, but there's no judges for it, so they just haven't done anything with it yet. So it's a judge issue. They just don't have enough of the judges, all right. So the politics, and you mentioned some of this in your piece too, The politics of this is that if you're going to add more judges, that means you're going to add more Democrat judges. Because they're elected from the local population. The local Democrat party controls the bar, as they do in virtually every city and around the country. So you're just going to add more Democrat judges. Is that really a wise thing to do for Republicans? I think it is. I think, you know, there's not really a great way to get around that. Would I prefer to have a Republican judge in there, Yes, but I would rather have a judge than no judge. And I think that the tide is turning. You know, Democrats are starting to get more serious about the crime issue. I think Thomas Mills just had it yesterday. He's a Democratic operative who runs a newsletter and he said it's time for Democrats to get stronger on crime. Yeah, I'm hearing good things from Governor Josh Stein. He wants to get tougher on crime. So I think we gotta take the risk and get more judges in there, no matter what their party is. Yeah. Yes, I welcome the democrats new found respect for funding of law enforcement after uh, you know, five years or so of rejecting that idea. Now, I did find this interesting. Nick Craig, who is uh he's the host of the Carolina Journal Radio Hour here on WBT five to six am. He's down in Wilmington, and he cited a he pulled. I was not able to watch this yesterday, the debate in the Senate on Arena's law. But there was an amendment run by Mohammed Majab I believe is his name, and he's a senator from Mecklimbur County. And I don't know if you're aware of this. He wanted to run an amendment that would ban the use of a deceased crime victim's name, image, or likeness in political advertisements. Have you heard that? I had not heard that. That's kind of insane to me. That's gonna go nowhere, so I'm not gonna worry too much about it. Oh, you are correct, it did go absolutely nowhere. But why on earth? Whatever do you think could be the motivation for why a Democrat senator from Mecklenburg might not want to be able to see or to have his opponents use this kind of imagery in the upcoming campaign. Like there are few things I have seen legislatively that are as blatant as this, but this one, like this is like a chef's kiss takes the cake moment here, It's just obvious in its intent. He is so Democrats, I think are very afraid of the way this is going to be used against them, and I think think that's why they're now sounding a different tune on the crime issue, which again I'm fine, anything else on this we didn't cover for you. No, I think that about covered it. I mean, the big other thing that I really would love to see in Arena's law is more benchmarks around how quickly cases go from charge to trial. I think, you know, if we add more adas, if we hopefully add more judges, then I think we can have more clear accountability and more guidelines. You know, we can't let these cases go to three four years before trial because witnesses tend to disappear and then charges get dropped, and we can't let that happen. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. The longer the cases go, the less likely you get a condiction out of it. So Andrew Dunn always good to have you. I appreciate your time in Yeah, thank you. All right, that's Andrew Dunn. You can catch his work over at long Leaf Politics. That's long leafpol dot com. And you can read him when he appears in the Charlotte Observer on the editor pages as a contributing columnist. All Right, you hear me talk a lot about incentives, right, Well, let's talk about incentive trips, the kind that companies offer employees to fire them up and reward their teams. If you own a business or you work somewhere that offers these incentive trips, first off, good for you. But also there is a custom app that's a game changer for these trips. It's called Incentive trip Kit. Private group messaging, shared photos, your itinerary, travel details, all built into a single, easy to use app. There's even a traveler locator. So Carl from Accounting doesn't get left behind. The best part about Incentive trip Kit. It's totally private, no email captures, no sign ups, no cringe ads. It's simple, clean and secure, and when the trip is over, incentive trip Kit turns those highlights into a professional storytelling video. So think about it. When you launch next year's incentive trip campaign, that video becomes your greatest motivator. Talk about a return on investment. Right, You got to check out incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive trip kit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns. One of the one of the nuggets or nuggets if you're from the Midwest, that from the Andrew Dunn's peace over at Long Leave politics. There was a breakdown in the number of judges per population back in two thousand and six, so almost twenty years ago. In Mecklinberg County, there were eight hundred thousand residents. And those are not the inmates at the county lockup. As Sheriff Gary not my fault McFadden likes to call them instead of inmates, he calls them residents, but actual residents you know of Mecklinberg County eight hundred thousand, twenty years ago and there were seven Superior court judges, so that works out to be a little bit more than one judge per hundred thousand. Now we have one point two million people, a fifty percent increase in our population, and we have eight superior court judges, so now we are under under one per hundred thousand, so we've lost ground. We have a lower judge staffing level per one hundred thousand population. And I agree with Andrew, I think it does matter. I think that does have an impact. It bogs down the system, he writes. When there's no credible threat of a trial, plea negotiations fall apart, defendants don't take deals, and the most serious charges often get watered down or quietly dismissed, which, by the way, they never send out. The DA's office never gives you the press release on that. They never give you the press releases on when they drop charges. And I know because I watch. I keep an eye out for the press releases from the DA's office, and they'll let us know when they get a conviction or even an acquittal. I went over some of this last week. But they never tell us when they drop charges unless it's a very high profile case. I mentioned this also with Andrew. This is a hang on a second, I mentioned his name and I want yeah, oh sorry, I think I'd reversed his first and last name. Senator Mujaba Mohammad. He is a Charlotte Democrat, so his first name is Mujaba and his last name is Mohammed. Senator Mohammad And according to Nick Craig, he introduced an amendment to House Bill three oh seven yesterday, otherwise known as Arena's Law, and the title of it is use of a deceased crime victim's name, image, or likeness in political advertisements. And it would create a prohibition on the use of a deceased crime victim's name, image, or likeness in political advertising. Crime victims shall be treated with dignity and respect. It is further declared to be the public safety policy of the state. So they don't want any of the images of Zarutzka's murder to be used in political ads against Democrats. They are acutely aware of the problem that they have on criminal justice as a topic. Voters do not trust Democrats at the local level and at the state level, and at the national level they pull terribly. Democrats do among the general public and among voters pull terribly on the criminal justice issue. And the fellow that used to run the recruitment and gave campaign support for Republican candidates for the State House, Stephen Wiley was his name. I think he has since moved on to another gig, but he did this for years. We've interviewed him on the show a few times over those years. And the Black Lives Matter riot, the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful looting and rioting, that stuff did so much damage to Democrats politically. They were signing on to just the most insane radical platforms and pledges and stuff. At the height of all this, they just got totally swept up in it. Talk about social contagions, right, they were so swept up in it they thought, this is our moment defund the police. They're just basically modern day slave patrols. And they were all in. And cities burned, people got hurt, people got killed, businesses got looted. And. They paid the price as they should have. Republicans used that issue against them very effectively. And so that's what Senator Muhammad was trying is he tried, he tried to preempt but it went absolutely nowhere, which it's amazing to me, Like, dude, you're in the minority in the state Senate. Why would you even run a. Bill like that? Is the juice worth the squeeze for that? The best spin you can get from that story is that you're trying to protect the victim's family. That's the best spin you can get. And the worst is what I'm doing right now, is the fact that you're trying to insulate yourself from the soft on crime policies, and so you just want to basically engage in a censorship of your political opponents so it doesn't harm your electoral prospects. It's just a terrible look for you. Game on Week one starts now, and every touchdown brings you closer to a payout. With Draft Kings sports book and official sports betting partner of the NFL, this isn't just football. It's first touchdown fireworks. Anytime TD rushes live bets that ride every momentum shift that Draft Kings, every play is your next shot to win. Will the Panthers win? Will we even get a touch New customers bet just five dollars and get three hundred dollars in bonus bets. Instantly, plus get over two hundred dollars off NFL Sunday ticket from YouTube and YouTube TV. So your season starts now. 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Digital games and commercial use excluded. Restrictions apply additional NFL Sunday Ticket terms or at YouTube dot com slash go slash NFL Sunday Tickets slash terms Limited time offer. Got a message, a commun que from up in the Raleigh area, I'll call it. I think Senator Mohammad's amendment was more of an effort to minimize any any Willie Horton ads or the Willy Hortoning of Anita Earls and Roy Cooper drawing direct lines to the Racial Equity Justice Task Force whatever it was called the Trek. Yes, I think you. Yeah, I did not mean to intimate that the effort to ban any images of crime victims in political advertising, this ridiculous anti free speech amendment that Senator Muhammad attempted to run. I did not mean to intimate that it was only for his benefit. It was obviously for all Democrats, And yeah, I think it definitely would have helped if it had passed. It would have helped you prohibit the kind of. Although it would have been litigated and they would have lost, because you can't stop somebody from making an ad on YouTube that uses images of Arena Zerutzka's attack against Roy Cooper, my good friend Ray and Anita Earls, who is the Supreme Court judge running for reelection, who, by the way, just did a series of fundraisers in Los Angeles and San Francisco because nothing screams North Carolina values like San Francisco. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Democrat party chair was posting this stuff to you know, make sure you donate, buy your tickets and all of this fundraiser in San Francisco and another one in Los Angeles for Anita Earls. That's who we want to remain on the Supreme Court of North Carolina. To be sure. Now, this builds the house built three oh seven Arena's law. It did actually pass out of the Senate yesterday. It'll be taken up today in the North Carolina House. Democrats walked out of the vote. And it was pointed out to me. I saw this also when the so okay, so you know, when you do an article, you're writing a piece for the Charlotte Observer, the News and Observer rights same parent company, and you put a picture at the top of the page, right that goes with the article and a lot of times this look media does this all the time. They don't have an image from the exact event or something, and so they just take what they call a stock photo. It's in their library, you know. Usually it'll be you know, like the image of the State House or the seal of North Carolina from the wall or whatever. They'll they'll they'll take just some stock photo. And the stock photo that they used for their piece about the Democrats walking out of this vote yesterday, it was it was a bunch of inmates dressed in the county orange jumpsuits walking down a hallway in a jail. And I get it because it's about you know, criminal justice bill and I don't know who made that decision. But here's the problem is that the headline says Democrats walk out of vote, and they're showing you this long line of people that are in jail in their jumpsuits, in the orange jumpsuits, walking down a hallway, and it gives this impression that they're all Democrats, which is actually it's actually probably kind of true. I kid, I kid the Democrats. But here's the problem. When you share that story on social media, the algorithms, the social media platforms, they grab the photo that's attached to the article, and so now this story and the headline is getting blasted all over the place with the headline that Democrats are walking out and all you see these inmates walking. Huh. I don't know why that makes me laugh so much, but it does. I laughed at it when I first saw it. It's just funny, Okay. It takes very little to amuse me sometimes. So here's the story from Avi Badjpaie. He is at the News and Observer, the McClatchy paper. A Republican drafted crime bill introduced in response to the fatal stabbing on Charlotte's light rail last month appeared to have bipartisan support yesterday until an amendment prompted Democrats to walk out. What was the amendment, Well, Senate Leader Phil Berger introduced an amendment that would direct the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction to implement alternative methods of execution used in other states. If North Carolina's only legally allowed method on the books right now, which is lethal injection, if that's ruled by courts to be unconstitutional or was otherwise unable to be administered. So again, for people who may not be aware of this because you've recently, within the last twenty years, moved to North Carolina. We do not execute people in this state any longer. It's still on the books, but we haven't done it since two thousand and six. There was a whole bunch of litigation and they said, you can't use the lethal injection because it's cruel and unusual punishment because people suffer as they're getting the drugs put in them to kill them whatever. And so there have been no executions. So what Phil Berger is saying, well, if we can't use our method, then this amendment to the law would allow any other method in any other state that has been ruled constitutional to be allowable here. And what does that mean electric chair and firing squad And so Democrats walked out, which doesn't Actually that doesn't actually change the vote because Republicans were still going to vote in favor of this and pass Arena's law. So it passed anyway. But you simply walked out. And so now you played the role of coward. I understand if you want to make the argument that you are again the death penalty, and you are so against the death penalty that is the law in North Carolina, that you're so against it that you will vote against Arena's law. See but that would require courage, which you lack. So you did not actually stand up and vote for your principle that you oppose the death penalty. Rather, you walked out to avoid weighing in on the matter altogether, because you didn't want to go on the record as opposing Arena's law because you don't want that to be used against you in your campaign. That's the politics of what happened. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. 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Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. So going over the staff summary the Legislative Now Division of the General Assembly, they do this for all of these bills. They do in a summary of what the bill would do, and a House Bill three zero seven, called Arena's Law. It does a number of things for starters. Before setting conditions of pre trial release, a judicial official, a magistrate, or a judge must consider the factors provided in state law, which include the nature of circumstances of the offense, the defendant's family ties, financial resources, and mental condition, and the defendant's record of convictions. So this law would make some changes to that. First, a new definition of a violent offense. They add in a bunch of other types of offenses to give heightened scrutiny for pre trial release for defendants charged with these or with a significant criminal history. If a defendant is charged with a violent offense and court records indicate that a defendant has been involuntarily committed within the prior three years or charged with any offense, and the judicial official has reasonable grounds to believe the defendant is a danger to themselves or others, the judicial official shall enter and order including all of the following. You've got to require the defendant to get an initial exam, Require the arresting officer to transport that defendant too a hospital emergency room for the exam, Require the examiner to petition for involuntary commitment, or provide written notice to the court that there are no grounds to file a petition for involuntary commitment. So people are going to have to sign their names to stuff now to say no, this guy wasn't a threat at all. Also, if a defendant discharged with any violent offense, there would be a rebuttable presumption that no condition of release would reasonably assure the appearance of the defendant and the safety of the community. You follow that, if they're charged with a violent offense, there would be a rebuttable presumption that no condition of release would reasonably assure the appearance of the defendant. In other words, if this guy committed a violent defense, he's probably not going to show up to court. It can be rebutted, but that is a reasonable presumption. For a first offense, a judicial official could determine to release a defendant on a secured bond or house arrests with electronic monitoring. For a second violent offense, the judicial official could only release a defendant on house arrest with electronic monitoring if available. So no more just letting them walk out without monitoring. No, if they're not. Going to be held, they're going to be held at their home. With a monitoring device. Convicted of three or more offenses within the prior ten years, a judicial official may only release the defendant of the under the conditions of a secured bond or with house arrests with electronic monitoring. Finally, the section would delete the condition of releasing a defendant on a written promise to appear, so that's the cashless bail process, so that goes away. Under this section, new aggravating factor is added to the list, which is if the if an offense is committed while in public transportation systems, so if you're on the bus, you're on the train, you do something illegal, you commit a violent act. That is an aggravating factor, which then increases the sentencing protocols. And also rules are to be created to address conflicts of interest among magistrates. In addition to the chief district judge of the district in which that magistrate is appointed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can also suspend a magistrate. So now there is another mechanism to get some of these magistrates out of their posts when they're making really terrible decisions. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecallanarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.