North Carolina Opens Door to Death Penalty in Iryna Zarutska’s Murder

In the month since Iryna Zarutska was murdered on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail train, the Ukrainian refugee has become an icon of the right.

When the gruesome footage of her murder, in which a large Black man attacked an attractive white victim, was released on September 5 and circulated widely on social media, it unleashed a frenzy of racism, panic, and outlandish claims about the criminal legal system. The fevered response wasn’t steeped in reality but rather in far-right mythology.

Elon Musk went into a rage spiral about Black-on-white crime. Chaya Raichik, the right-wing provocateur behind LibsofTikTok, accused the media of covering up the crime so as not to offend racial justice activists. And numerous right-wing accounts mocked the idea that better mental health care might have anything to do with crime.

The far-right Fox News personality Jesse Waters blamed the murder on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, pointing out that the magistrate who freed Zarutska’s killer was a Black woman “who doesn’t even have a law degree.” And right-wing pundit Jesse Kelly suggested judges and prosecutors be imprisoned themselves when someone they’ve let out of prison goes on to commit another crime.

Elsewhere on Fox, commentator Brian Kilmeade contemplated what to do with homeless, mentally ill people and offered a simple solution: “Just kill them.”

Next up, of course, was the White House. President Donald Trump weighed in, with his typically calm and diplomatic demeanor.

Following the murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10, Zarutska become paired with Kirk in right-wing media as a martyr to an imaginary, soft-on-crime left. Trump has continued to post memes and images of Zarutska on his Truth Social platform in the weeks since.

This furor has also turned into legislative action. On Wednesday, the North Carolina state legislature passed a bill, “Iryna’s Law,” which would limit cashless bail, reinforce the ability to involuntarily commit people on the basis of mental health, and open the door to restarting executions in the state.

Every murder is a tragedy. Zarutska’s murder was horrific, brutal, and heartbreaking, particularly given that she had come to the U.S. from Ukraine to seek safety from the war.

Her murder, however, is not a common sort of crime, and it is not indicative of any larger trend. The people screaming most loudly about her death are advocating policies that will do little to stop similar crimes from happening again.

What the Right Gets Wrong

First, there is no epidemic of Black-on-white crime. About 80 to 90 percent of homicides in the U.S. are intraracial: They have a Black perpetrator and Black victim, or a white perpetrator and white victim.

And homicides and violent crime in general are in rapid decline. According to data analyst Jeff Asher, the FBI’s crime report next year will likely show 2025 to have the lowest murder rate ever recorded. In many cities, serious crimes are approaching all-time lows. Both homicides and violent crime in Charlotte are down significantly from last year, and even more from the nationwide surge in 2021 and 2022.

Murders committed by strangers are also rare. The data here are dirtier — most police departments don’t track the relationship between killer and victim — but from what we do know, about 10 percent of murders are committed by strangers. Women in particular are far more likely to be murdered by a relative than a stranger.

As for the DEI allegations, the fact that Mecklenburg County Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes isn’t a lawyer isn’t unusual. By one estimate, magistrates and judges in low-level courts aren’t required to have a law degree in 32 states. Those judges’ responsibilities often include setting bail and signing warrants. Their lack of legal training is often a problem, but as any public defender will tell you, the problem rarely manifests as a tendency to be too lenient. And leniency doesn’t appear to be evident in this case, either.

It’s true that Decarlos Brown, Zarutska’s killer, had a long criminal record. Based on public reporting, however, his most serious convictions are for shoplifting, larceny, breaking and entering, and armed robbery. He served six years in prison and one year of probation for the armed robbery — right around the national average.

To say that Brown should never have been released from prison implies that one or more of these crimes should have resulted in a life sentence — and I doubt most would say armed robbery deserves a punishment of life behind bars. And certainly none of his other crimes do.

Brown was arrested again in January for abusing the 911 system. Brown, who is schizophrenic, had called 911 to say that police had put a “chip” in him that controlled his thoughts and actions. It’s for this charge that Brown was released without bail. Brown’s attorney then asked for a psychiatric evaluation. A judge agreed but didn’t order the evaluation until July, and that evaluation never appears to have taken place.

Here, too, there are few jurisdictions in the country where Brown would have been held in jail. Misusing the 911 system is a minor offense, and in Brown’s case it was clearly driven by mental illness.

The Real Lesson

There is a lesson we ought to learn from this murder, but almost certainly won’t.

Over the last couple years, I’ve visited nearly two dozen public defender offices around the country. Over and over, these attorneys have told me that the most urgent problem in the criminal legal system is the way it treats the mentally ill, homeless people, and people battling addiction.

These three problems are inextricable from one another, and often drive one another. All three problems became immeasurably worse after Covid, and all three were then exacerbated by significant cuts to public funding for municipalities during the pandemic.

When a court orders a competency evaluation for someone charged with a crime who may be suffering from mental illness, it can take months for them to be evaluated — and then months more before they’re treated. In some states, it can be more than a year.

If it’s a serious crime, they spend that time waiting in a jail cell. If they get any treatment at all in jail, it’s typically cursory. The wait to be evaluated and treated is often longer — sometimes far longer — than the maximum sentence they could have received for the crime they were charged with in the first place. That’s because the most common charges for someone who is, say, homeless and mentally ill are for crimes like public trespass or public urination. Sometimes they’re still held in jail, anyway. Sometimes they’re released.

For those who are finally treated, the goal is only “restoration” — treatment to the point where they’re competent to stand trial. Once they’re released, the treatment stops. As you might expect, the whole experience is toxic and destructive for someone already suffering from mental illness. They’re often released in worse condition than they were before.

This is a problem all around the country, and North Carolina is no exception. The state’s mental health system is vastly underresourced. There aren’t enough doctors, facilities, or beds. This report from February found that the average wait time for someone charged with a crime to get into a state mental health facility in North Carolina is around six months. Some people accused of crimes in the state had waited more than a year.

Brown’s case didn’t even get that far. His attorney asked for a competency evaluation after his arrest in January. It wasn’t finally authorized by a judge until July, and it doesn’t appear to have happened at all. That’s a flaw in the system, but it isn’t the product of a system that’s too lenient.

Some commentators have pointed out that Brown’s mother said his condition deteriorated after he was released from prison in 2020, and that she repeatedly tried to get him treatment, but only succeeded in getting him in a facility for two weeks. After he was out, he stopped taking his medication. This, they say, is evidence that he should have been locked up for good.

Perhaps that’s true. But at that point, his worst crime was armed robbery, and it was one for which he’d served his sentence. How we determine when someone is a threat to themselves or others — and what to do about it — sits at a particularly perilous intersection of law and medicine.

We have to balance community safety with the rights and autonomy of the person in question. Involuntary commitment is a blunt instrument that can be easily abused. There are no easy answers. But given his record, a system that committed Brown against his will would be a system that commits thousands of people who pose no threat at all.

It’s understandable why some who favor harsher punishment might think that making this a discussion about mental illness absolves Brown of his culpability. But someone who commits a murder while severely schizophrenic isn’t deterred by a long prison sentence or the death penalty. By definition, they aren’t acting rationally.

The severity of Brown’s punishment will have no effect on how many murders like this we might see in the years to come. How we treat mental illness in our jails very well could.