- Iryna Zarutska’s murder revealed multiple deficiencies in North Carolina’s systems for protecting public safety and maintaining public order
- A recently enacted bill called “Iryna’s Law” does a good job of addressing several of those deficiencies
- Still, more must be done to prevent such tragedies in the future
North Carolinians were shocked when they saw a video of Iryna Zarutska being stabbed to death while riding a light rail train in Charlotte on August 22. Shock turned to outrage when they learned the details.
The suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., was a diagnosed schizophrenic. His family had tried to have him committed, but he was released after 14 days. At the time of the crime, he was homeless and off his meds. He had a long criminal record that included a conviction for armed robbery and two arrests for assault. He had appeared before a magistrate earlier in the year after telling police officers he’d been given “man-made material that controlled what he ate and how he walked and talked.” Despite his diagnosis, despite his criminal history, and despite an affidavit by the arresting officers, the magistrate had chosen not to order a psychiatric assessment of Brown but instead released him on a written promise to appear.
It was clear to the public that Decarlos Brown Jr. shouldn’t have been sitting on that train behind Iryna Zarutska, and the fact that he was made two more things equally clear:
- North Carolina needs to do a better job ensuring that people who are a danger to themselves and others due to mental illness are involuntarily committed
- North Carolina needs to do a better job of ensuring that dangerous arrestees are detained pending trial
House Bill (HB) 307, “Iryna’s Law,” which was approved by the General Assembly at the end of September and signed into law by Gov. Josh Stein at the beginning of October, addresses both of those needs. It tightens the pretrial release rules for arrestees accused of violent offences, requires mental health evaluations for an expanded range of arrestees, and makes it easier to suspend or remove magistrates who fail to adhere to statutory rules of conduct. If those changes had been in place when Brown had his many and various encounters with the criminal justice system, Zarutska might still be alive.
While those changes are good as far as they go, in the long run solving the problems revealed by Zarutska’s murder will almost certainly require additional and more comprehensive changes to law and policy.
This is most obviously true when it comes to mental health and involuntary commitment. The relevant provisions in Iryna’s Law will help ensure that people with obvious mental illnesses get evaluated and, when appropriate, committed after they have been arrested, but it still leaves several issues unaddressed. One of these is how the law should deal with someone like Brown, who is obviously mentally ill and who has also committed a dreadful crime. Should he be punished or committed for treatment? If the latter, for how long?
And what about the thousands of mentally ill homeless people who haven’t committed serious crimes? Allowing them to wander our streets and public spaces untreated diminishes everyone’s quality of life. It is particularly bad for the mentally ill themselves. They suffer from terrifying paranoid delusions. They hear frightening and often abusive voices. They are easy prey for criminals and abusers. And they are incapable of providing even a minimal standard of living for themselves. For their sake and ours, we need to find a way to get them off the streets and into long-term treatment.
The good news with regard to mental illness and involuntary commitment is that, in addition to the provisions listed above, Iryna’s Law allocates $1 million for a study of what it calls “[t]he intersection of mental health in the justice system.” In more good news, NC House Speaker Destin Hall has announced the formation of a “House Select Committee on Involuntary Commitment and Public Safety.”
The laws and policies pertaining to pretrial release may also need more radical changes than the ones incorporated in Iryna’s Law. Officials making pretrial detention decisions need to be provided with the best available tools for assessing the likelihood that arrestees will reoffend, given the authority and the resources to ensure that arrestees found to be a danger to others are held without bond, and held to account when they fail to do so. Along these lines, Paul Newby, the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, has issued an order creating a Pretrial Release Task Force.
Brown’s release earlier this year suggests that the laws and policies pertaining to the selection, training, supervision, and discretion of magistrates may also need changes beyond the ones incorporated in Iryna’s Law. I expect we will see some specific proposals along those lines in the coming weeks.
Finally, while clearly not the primary factor leading to Zarutska’s murder, it’s nevertheless relevant that her killer was riding Charlotte’s light rail line without a ticket. Intensive community policing — a system emphasizing heavy police presence in high-crime areas to maintain order — works, and preventing fare evasion on public transit is an important part of it.
Given that a couple of officers were riding in a different car at the time of the murder, it’s not clear that deploying more police officers to patrol Charlotte’s light rail system would have saved Zarutska’s life, but it might have done so simply by discouraging Brown from getting on the train.
More importantly, it is undeniable that deploying more police officers in public places of all kinds will save many lives in the long run. In response to Zarutska’s death, Rep. Laura Budd (D-Mecklenburg) has proposed providing supplemental funding for 5,000 additional local police officers statewide. The devil is always in the details with such proposals, but supplemental police funding is something the John Locke Foundation has advocated in the past. That part of Rep. Budd’s proposal, at least, deserves serious consideration.
Iryna’s Law is an important step in the right direction, and the members of the General Assembly and the governor are to be congratulated for enacting it into law. Nevertheless, more can and should be done to ensure fewer tragedies like Iryna Zarutska’s. Fortunately, it looks very likely that more will be done.
For more information see:
Solving North Carolina’s Crime Problem: Part One
Solving North Carolina’s Crime Problem: Part Two
Solving North Carolina’s Crime Problem: Part Three
Solving North Carolina’s Crime Problem: Part Four
