A violent repeat offender who skipped court before raping a 29-year-old woman in a porta-john. A career criminal who racked up 37 felony charges, including strangling a woman to stop her from calling 911. These are some of the offenders who received substantially reduced bonds or walked free thanks to judges appointed by former North Carolina governor and Senate hopeful Roy Cooper (D.).
Cooper is pitching himself to voters as a tough-on-crime governor who kept thousands of violent criminals behind bars and signed stricter bail laws when he led North Carolina from 2017 to 2025. But a Washington Free Beacon review has found that several of Cooper’s judicial appointees granted leniency to violent repeat criminals, some of whom went on to kill innocent North Carolinians after their release from jail.
That includes Octavis Wilson, a repeat offender who was captured on surveillance footage in November 2022 repeatedly punching a 29-year-old Charlotte woman who had just exited a city bus. Wilson then forced the woman into a porta-john against her will and raped her. “Several smears of blood and a blood-soaked tissue” were later discovered at the scene of the crime, police records show. Just one month prior, Wilson had been arrested for missing court on a separate charge of attempted rape in which he threatened another Charlotte woman with a pocketknife. Both of his crimes occurred in the same area of the city.
Wilson, who admitted to having sex with the woman in the porta-john, was charged with second-degree rape and first-degree kidnapping. A magistrate initially set his bond at $2 million, but that changed after Mecklenburg County judge Tracy Hewett, a Cooper appointee, got involved in the case just days after the assault.
“We’re gonna help you out,” Hewett told Wilson during a court hearing after the assailant complained his bond was set too high and promised he “will not mess up no more.” The Cooper-appointed judge reduced Wilson’s bond to just $50,000—a reduction of 97.5 percent—in a move that enraged Charlotte police chief Johnny Jennings, who said it suggested to his constituents that the North Carolina judiciary prioritizes the desires of violent criminals over the safety of their communities.
Following years of court delays, the Mecklenburg County Clerk of Superior Court ruled in August that Wilson lacked the mental capacity to stand trial and posed a danger to himself and others. The case was dismissed and Wilson was involuntarily committed to a mental institution, court records show.
Elevating hardened progressives to the North Carolina judiciary was standard practice for Cooper during his two terms as governor. His July 2023 appointee to serve as a district court judge in Durham County, Kendra Montgomery-Blinn, is a self-proclaimed progressive Democrat who boasted of her adherence to “restorative justice” and her attendance at “many racial equity trainings as a lawyer and a judge” in an October 2024 interview.
Montgomery-Blinn put those principles into practice in February. Career criminal Shyrone Evans, who had racked up 37 felony charges since July 2023, had been charged with strangling and punching a woman in an attempt to stop her from calling 911. But Evans found his way back onto the streets after Montgomery-Blinn set his bond at just $15,000.
Evans allegedly killed a man less than two months later. He crashed a stolen Kia into an SUV in March, killing a man who was on his way to receive dialysis, authorities say. Evans was charged with second-degree murder along with three other felonies and is being held without bond in Durham County Detention Facility.
Cooper’s record on crime has become an early flashpoint in his campaign bid to win the seat being vacated by Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) following the gruesome subway murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in August at the hands of a repeat criminal. A Cooper appointee, district judge Roy Wiggins supervises magistrate judge Teresa Stokes, who, in turn, authorized the cash-free release of Zarutska’s killer from jail in January after he was charged with a Class 1 misdemeanor. Cooper touts on his campaign website his creation of a “racial equity” task force during his governorship that pushed policies to eliminate cash bail for Class 1 misdemeanors.
Cooper’s likely Republican challenger, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, said the former governor’s appointees “continue to endanger communities across North Carolina” as public polling shows voters overwhelmingly trust Republicans to handle crime better than Democrats.
“From forcing pre-trial release and cashless bail into our justice system to appointing radical judges who coddle repeat offenders and allow them to roam our streets and prey on innocent North Carolinians,” Whatley said, “Cooper’s agenda puts criminals over law-abiding Americans, and he belongs nowhere near the U.S. Senate. As a U.S. senator, my top priority will be working with President Trump to restore law and order and keep each and every North Carolinian safe.”
Cooper also leaned on progressive prosecutors to serve on judicial policy advisory boards. In 2017, he appointed Wake County district attorney Lorrin Freeman to serve on the North Carolina Courts Commission. In 2021, Freeman participated in a working group of North Carolina prosecutors that issued a report calling on the state to institute anti-bias trainings for prosecutors and recommending policies that allow magistrates to use citations and summons in lieu of arrest for some offenses.
Repeat offenders have run rampant in Wake County under Freeman’s watch. Since she took office in 2014, some 776 individuals have been arrested 14 or more times, according to the Triangle Trumpet. One individual, Michael Terrann Fitts, has racked up 70 arrests and 148 charges in that timeframe, including 5 counts of assaulting a government official, 5 counts of assault on a female, 37 counts of second-degree trespass, and 12 counts of misdemeanor larceny.
Cooper, through a campaign spokesman, maintained he was tough on crime during his two terms as North Carolina’s governor.
“Roy Cooper is the only candidate who spent his career prosecuting violent criminals and keeping thousands of them behind bars as attorney general, and signing tough-on-crime laws and stricter bail and pretrial release rules as governor,” a Cooper campaign spokesman said. “DC insider and Big Oil lobbyist Michael Whatley is desperate to distract from his support for cuts to law enforcement that make North Carolinians less safe.”
The post Meet the Violent Career Criminals Who Received Reduced Bail, Walked Free Thanks to Roy Cooper’s Judicial Appointees appeared first on .