Will Cooper issue more clemency for NC prisoners? A vigil outside his house demands it.

Every day this month, advocates for the more than 30,000 people incarcerated in North Carolina prisons will gather outside the governor’s mansion in downtown Raleigh. Their message for Gov. Roy Cooper is simple.

“The clemency power is a constitutional power that is vast,” says Daniel Bowes, the director of policy and advocacy at the ACLU of North Carolina. “Gov. Cooper has it within his individual ability to release people from prison, and if he wanted to truly enact a more fair criminal justice system, and clearly one that doesn’t incarcerate the highest rate of people in the world, then he could actually achieve that.”

Bowes was standing by a parking lot across the street from Cooper’s residence Friday afternoon, along with other advocates and people whose families have been impacted by incarceration. Over the course of the next four weeks, activists from Decarcerate Now NC, a coalition of local civil rights and criminal justice organizations, will gather for daily vigils to raise awareness and put pressure on the Democratic governor to reduce the number of people imprisoned across the state.

This is the coalition’s third year of holding daily vigils outside the governor’s mansion to campaign for more people to have their sentences commuted. At the launch of the monthlong effort Thursday, advocates delivered a letter to Cooper’s staff, calling on him to take “decisive action to decarcerate North Carolina and stop the use of imprisonment as a catch-all response to societal harms.”

People in state prisons who are ill, of advanced age, are imprisoned for technical violations of parole, or were imprisoned as children should be released immediately, advocates say in the letter, and those on death row should not face execution.

Family members turned advocates

For some activists, the issue of incarceration is personal.

Jared Smith, 35, said he had been trying to advocate for his uncle, Doug, who has been in prison since 2009, when he heard about Decarcerate Now NC’s campaign to push for more people to receive clemency.

His uncle, who is 64 and suffers from multiple chronic illnesses and is permanently blind in one eye, was convicted on charges of first degree rape, sexual offense, and kidnapping, according to the N.C. Department of Public Safety. He’s effectively serving a life sentence, with a projected release date in 2108.

Jared says his uncle has been mistreated and denied proper medical care.

“Regardless of whether they’re innocent or guilty, or whatever they did, they deserve to be treated humanely, and they deserve adequate medical care,” Smith said. “Their health care and their treatment should not be diminished based on their incarceration status, or because they’re poor, or because they’re Black or brown, or gay.”

Jared said he believes there were problems with his uncle’s trial and conviction, but trying to get an attorney to even discuss his uncle’s case has been “daunting” and “demoralizing.”

Initially, he joked that the way things were going, he would need to get a law license and represent his uncle himself. As time went by, however, and as he met other activists pushing for Cooper to commute sentences, he decided to “go for it.” He’s currently applying to law schools, and hopes to help his uncle and others.

Cooper expects to commute more sentences

At the heart of Decarcerate Now NC’s campaign is the concern of advocates that Cooper has been too reluctant to use his power to grant clemency.

In March, Cooper commuted the sentences of three people who were convicted of crimes when they were teenagers, following recommendations by the Juvenile Sentence Review Board, a four-member panel he established in 2021. All three people granted clemency were required to complete post-release supervision “to help them succeed and avoid missteps when they return to their communities,” the governor’s office said at the time.

In a statement, Mary Scott Winstead, a spokesperson for Cooper, said the governor, the Office of Executive Clemency and the Office of the General Counsel “carefully review all applications for clemency.” Winstead also pointed to Cooper’s executive order establishing the Juvenile Sentence Review Board.

“He expects more commutations to be issued as the process moves forward,” Winstead said.

Those actions, and others, including the pardon of Ronnie Long, who served 44 years in prison before being freed in 2020 after a federal court overturned his rape conviction, are encouraging, Bowes said. But more needs to be done, he said.

Going forward, the power of clemency needs to be applied to provide “categorical relief,” he said, not just in individual cases.

“The War on Drugs was a mistake, for example, and let’s release individuals who have felony drug convictions,” Bowes said.

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