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Did U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley want North Carolina prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic?
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Did his opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper, want the prisoners to remain behind bars despite the risk the virus posed for them?
And why is a video of Whatley, uncovered by WSOC-TV in Charlotte, leaving both men explaining where they stood on the issue in the early 2020s, when the virus tore through North Carolina’s prisons infecting one in every six prisoners?
In July 2020, Whatley sat for a roundtable in Catawba County surrounded by Republican leaders including then-state Rep. Jason Saine. And he told his audience Cooper “did not act to protect folks in prisons, so we have had a significant spike among the prison population as well as prison guards …”
At the time, Wake County Superior Court Judge Vinston Rozier Jr. had recently ruled that the conditions of the jail were unconstitutional due to COVID-19, in a lawsuit by civil rights groups against the state calling for the release of 18,000 prisoners.
A month earlier, Rozier had ordered the state to offer applications for facilities and homes willing to serve as a potential early-release partner for inmates; develop extended criteria of who could safely be released earlier, including those who had served their mandatory minimum sentences; and consider using, more broadly, legal maneuvers already in place that would allow the prisons to release early inmates to reduce the prison population.
In July, Rozier said state officials failed to meaningfully follow his order.
The state Republican Party, led at the time by Whatley, put out a news release that same week saying that Cooper only took COVID in prison seriously when a judge ordered him to.
He told McClatchy during a news conference in Raleigh last week that when he spoke in July 2020, he was not calling on prisoners to be released.
“What I was saying was that conditions in prisons needed to be addressed,” Whatley said. “What we saw in many other states was they took steps to address it that involved COVID shots, they involved masks, they involved separation. Certainly, we did not call in any way for there to be a release of prisoners, let alone 4,200 of them, including the worst of the worst, with pedophiles and predators and rapists and murderers.”
Department of Adult Correction Communications Director Keith Acree told McClatchy in April in a written statement: “The people managing the settlement process worked very hard to find candidates for release that presented the lowest risk to public safety, using risk assessment tools and knowledge of past behavior.”
The United States’ first batch of COVID vaccines became available in December 2020, five months after Whatley’s criticism of Cooper that he now ties to using vaccines in the prisons. The state staggered distribution by need and didn’t make vaccines available to everyone over 16 until April 7, 2021.
As for masks, Republican officials in North Carolina largely opposed mask mandates.
In July 2020, Whatley wrote an op-ed in North State Journal, a conservative news outlet, calling masks “tools” and “important” but not “a plan.” He criticized an ad by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services calling on state residents to mask and stand 6 feet apart. He called on North Carolinians to demand a plan from Cooper.
During Thursday’s news conference where Whatley announced the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association endorsed his campaign, he gave an eight-minute speech holding up photos of North Carolina prisoners released under the settlement who he said went on to commit violent crimes.
He then held up a photograph of DeCarlos Brown, a 34-year-old man charged in the fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, on the Charlotte light rail in August 2025.
Zarutska’s death became a political flashpoint in the Senate race. At first Republicans accused Cooper of being soft on crime for the state’s bail policies, because Brown was out of jail on bail awaiting trial for misuse of the 911 system.
Then Republicans leaked to Fox News a list, sealed under court order, of the list of people released early from prison — and Brown’s name was included.
Brown wasn’t actually released early. He had served his full sentence and was out of prison before the court-ordered settlement, but state officials included his name anyway. That hasn’t stopped Republicans and Whatley from accusing Cooper of being responsible for her death.
The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in North Carolina on March 22, 2020, and the virus quickly ran rampant in North Carolina’s jails and prisons. Acree, the correction spokesperson, told McClatchy in April that at the height of COVID, 14,000 inmates tested positive for the virus, 4% were hospitalized and 63 died between 2020 and 2023, with two additional deaths since then.
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Civil rights groups called on Cooper to release 18,000 prisoners, but he refused to sign an executive order to implement their request, leading to a lawsuit filed in Wake County Superior Court in April 2020.
By June, Rozier ordered the prison system to expand early release criteria, but it wouldn’t be until February 2021 that the settlement was in place.
On Monday, Cooper held a campaign rally in Graham where he spoke about how he plans to “make stuff cost less” if he is elected senator.
After addressing supporters, he took questions from reporters, where he answered McClatchy’s question about the 2020 video and Whatley’s explanation of it.
Cooper said that at the time of the video Whatley knew the court ordered the state to release the prisoners and complained the state hadn’t done something before the court ordered it.
“It’s pretty clear that he has made this COVID prisoner release the center of his political attack, but he’s been caught lying about it time and again,” Cooper said. “I was the one who fought these releases.”
“And we know that when he says that he meant that we should have used more vaccines, vaccines didn’t even exist at the time. What this court was talking about was releasing prisoners. And the bottom line is here: I‘m the only one in this race who’s actually prosecuted violent criminals — worked to keep them behind bars …”
Prior to serving two terms as governor, Cooper served 16 years as the state’s attorney general. Whatley worked as an energy lobbyist and for lawmakers including former President George W. Bush and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, before becoming chairman of the state party and then the Republican National Committee.
Cooper went on to criticize Whatley for allowing a convicted sex offender to rise in the ranks within the North Carolina Republican Party, as first reported by Asheville Watchdog.
Harvey West served as North Carolina’s 1st District Republican Party chairman under Whatley, though he told WRAL that Whatley didn’t want him in the position. He wouldn’t offer an explanation to the television station on why.
However, by 2011, West was appointed to the party’s powerful Plan of Organization committee and would be appointed another nine times. In 2021 and 2024, it was Whatley who made West’s appointment, West said.
West said he never hid his convictions from the state party, and some party members, including Michele Woodhouse, fought for years trying to have him removed.
It wasn’t until the story broke during Whatley’s campaign that the state’s Republican Party voted to ban sex offenders from holding party office.
“… He has appointed a convicted sex offender who served time in jail to a prominent position in the North Carolina Republican Party to the point where the Republican Party has had to come in to prevent that in the future, and that’s just wrong,” Cooper added.” And I think that shows where I stand on crime, and where he stands on crime.”
Asked by The Assembly if he pushed back against the prisoner release or regrets it happening, Cooper noted that it was a court order, and argued the court could have ordered a lot more prisoners released.
Instead, the two sides reached an agreement to release 3,500 of them. All of the prisoners chosen for release were set to fulfill their sentences within the year.
“The fact is that the prison officials made the decisions regarding specific prisoners, and the fact remains that Michael Whatley and his friends have been lying about this at almost every single turn, particularly with people that they bring up when they know that they were not released under this settlement, so I’m ready to talk about the issues,” Cooper said. “I’m proud of my record on crime, making sure that we’ve worked to keep prisoners behind bars.”
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He vowed to continue to keep North Carolina families safe.
So did Whatley.