Attorney General Roy Cooper eats crow, a little bit | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

Buys his way out of liable lawsuit for $75K and a measley apology--but that is just our opinion of the implications of this case

    Roy Cooper is reported to have settled a decade old liable lawsuit that had been filed against him as a result of a 2000 campaign ad he ran while running for Attorney General. Cooper can still remain in office, having gone on to win the race for Attorney General.

    Reports indicate that Cooper backed down by apologizing and paying a substantial amount of money in the liable settlement. What impact it will have on his political future is uncertain at this point, but will obviously be used if he does decide to run for office again.

    The case also illustrates the weak accountability North Carolina imposes on candidates who run false ads during a campaign. Some have likened it to the infamous product liability cases where companies take a calculated risk knowing they are in the wrong but figure the benefits outweigh the risks and even if they lose later they will gain more than they have to pay. Viewed in that light the outcome of this case does not say much for the toothless campaign laws in North Carolina.

    Cooper, who has all but announced his bid to run for Governor in 2016, was forced to apologize and pay $75,000 to the Boyce family for having run ads claiming falsely that Dan Boyce billed $28,000 an hour in a law suit that Boyce did not participate in, but rather his family members had. The suit was on behalf of taxpayers that resulted in the taxpayers being refunded more than a billion dollars they had been illegally charged by the state, controlled by Democrats at the time. At the time the ad ran Cooper was running against Dan Boyce for Attorney General.

    His apology read, in part: "Gene Boyce, Dan Boyce, Laura Isley and Philip Isley are all excellent and ethical lawyers and honorable people," said a statement signed by Cooper and Julia White, an aide in the 2000 campaign. "To the extent the political TV ad in the 2000 election for Attorney General implied anything else, we were wrong and we apologize."

    To which we would say: "to the extent that AG Cooper has apologized, we commend him, but would offer that in our opinion his penance is a poor excuse for what was done. We think he should resign as Attorney General and should be too ashamed to ever file to run for public office again. If there are those who read an implication that we think the Attorney General's apology, to the extent that it was an apology, is woefully inadequate we would extinguish such implications and say there is no Joy in Mudville over our Attorney General."