A Republican super PAC has been running an ad that makes the misleading claim that North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper “let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf” when he was the state’s attorney general. The evidence kits were in the custody of hundreds of local law enforcement agencies and were never submitted for testing by the state crime laboratory that Cooper oversaw as attorney general.
The kits, which include swabs and other materials to collect blood, urine and DNA samples, are used in forensic medical examinations and become evidence in sexual assault cases. It was not known how many of the completed kits local law enforcement offices throughout the state still had in their possession until an audit was required under a new state law in 2017, when Cooper had ascended from attorney general to governor.
Cooper, the Democratic candidate, is facing Republican Michael Whatley in the race that will determine who replaces Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
The ad attacking Cooper was paid for by No Going Back PAC Inc., a newly formed super PAC with ties to another super PAC, MAGA Inc., which is affiliated with President Donald Trump. More than $2.3 million has been spent running the ad on broadcast and digital platforms since Sept. 10, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
The ad begins with the narrator saying, “What kind of politician betrays rape victims? Ask Roy Cooper. He let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf. Cooper denied justice to survivors.”
But that gives viewers the false impression that Cooper had the evidence kits in his possession and didn’t do the tests. That’s not what happened.
In 2017, a state law was enacted that required local law enforcement agencies to do an inventory of the kits in their custody. The kits, for various reasons, had never been submitted to the North Carolina State Crime Laboratory for testing when Cooper was head of the state Department of Justice, which includes the crime lab. So, the number of untested kits was not previously known.
The audit language was included in a budget bill that Cooper vetoed as governor. The bill became law after the General Assembly overrode Cooper’s veto.
After the statewide inventory was done, the NCDOJ reported in early 2018 that more than 500 local law enforcement agencies had 15,160 kits in their possession, and the department said it would devise a plan to get them tested.
In its report, the state DOJ said the statewide audit in 2017 found that 3,820 of the untested kits were tied to cases in which “allegations were determined to be unfounded as a result of further investigation,” 2,741 kits were linked to cases that had already been resolved in court, 1,054 kits were associated with cases in which a “suspect admitted to the sexual act in question,” and in 390 cases “the victim wished to remain anonymous and did not report the incident to the authorities.” The other 7,545 kits did not fall into any of those four categories.
In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill, the Survivor Act, which Cooper signed into law, that included funding to do the tests, and created a requirement that local law enforcement agencies submit sexual assault evidence kits to the state crime lab, or another approved testing facility, within 45 days of receiving them from a medical office.
We were not able to get in contact with No Going Back PAC Inc. for this story. We called the treasurer listed on its Federal Election Commission filings, and reached out to MAGA Inc. for a contact as well.
As supporting evidence, the ad cites an April 2024 Carolina Journal news article about North Carolina, under then Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein, clearing its “decades-long backlog of untested rape kits” that year, referring to the thousands of kits that local law enforcement had been holding. The story said the untested kits had been a “bad mark on the state dating back to the time when Gov. Roy Cooper served as the state’s attorney general for 16 years,” from January 2001 to January 2017.
In an interview, Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that runs the End the Backlog initiative, told us that blame for the thousands of kits that were not tested doesn’t lie with one person. She said both local and state officials could have done more to treat sexual assault crimes seriously and prioritize kit testing.
“One of the important things to remember or understand about rape kit backlogs is that it’s the result of kind of a system-wide failure, and it starts at the very local level,” she said. “It comes down to there are often no laws on the books saying what has to happen with this evidence, and so the decision whether or not to send a rape kit for testing would be up to one detective” who “would make the decision not to send it sometimes based on their own conclusion of the credibility of the victim, or the likeliness of the case” to be successful.
If there had actually been 16,000 rape kits sitting in the State Crime Laboratory, waiting to be tested, “you could pass some blame pretty clearly” onto Cooper, Knecht said.
“But in this situation, it was all these [local] jurisdictions making 1,000 decisions a year not sending kits, and it was kind of hidden,” she said. “Until the inventory happened, it was hard to really know what the extent of the problem was.”
“Could everybody have done more and done better? Of course,” she said. “It’s just a multifaceted problem that involves a lot of different stakeholders.”
The Cooper campaign responded to the ad’s claim on a FAQ page on its website.
“The 16,000 rape kits this question refers to was a tally of kits sitting in local law enforcement offices across the state that were discovered over a year after Roy had left the Attorney General’s office. No state office had knowledge of where they all were, possession or control of them and no statewide count of all untested rape kits in the possession of local law enforcement even existed until after Roy was elected Governor,” the page says.
Released Inmates
The ad narrator also makes the claim that Cooper “caved to the defund the police radicals and released 3,500 criminals.” That’s a reference to a court settlement that Cooper reached in February 2021 to release that many North Carolina inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic, after being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists seeking to protect inmates and corrections staff by reducing the state’s prison population.
As we previously wrote, Cooper had objected to the early releases until a judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiffs and called on the state to come up with an inmate reduction plan.
The narrator then says, “Released early, this convicted child molester shot a man dead,” wrongly suggesting that Jimmie Speight Jr., the man shown in the ad, was an inmate Cooper released early.
Speight was already out of prison when the settlement was reached, according to his state prison record. He completed his previous prison term and was released as scheduled on Nov. 25, 2020. He was on a nine-month post-release supervision term when he was taken into custody on March 9, 2021, for violating the terms of his release because of new misdemeanor charges, including larceny.
“On 03/11/2021, following a preliminary hearing on the violation, Speight’s post-release supervision was reinstated because the pending charges were misdemeanors,” Keith Acree, communications director for the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, told us in an email. “Speight’s reinstatement met the definition for an early reentry under the NAACP v. Cooper settlement terms, which is why he appears on the settlement list even though he was already out of prison,” Acree said.
About a month later, on April 8, Speight was arrested on murder charges, as well as rape and kidnapping charges stemming from a separate incident. In 2023, Speight was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to more than 32 years in prison.
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