NCGOP Leaders Rip Cooper's Record of Failure With the Crime Lab | Eastern NC Now

Press Release:

    WILMINGTON, N.C.     The outcry over the failures of the state Crime lab reached Wilmington as former state Senator Thom Goolsby and NCGOP Communications Director Kami Mueller detailed the ineffective leadership of Roy Cooper.

    "All of the state's law enforcement agencies abandoned Roy Cooper to endorse Pat McCrory," stated Mueller. "For 16 years as Attorney General, Cooper has failed to show up for work, he has dropped the ball on behalf of North Carolinians, his agents have cut corners, bullied the vulnerable, and his Crime Lab has hidden results that were departmental policy."

    In a scathing 2010 exposé by The News & Observer, it was revealed that not turning over negative test results was standard procedure. Cooper failed to act to change the culture and procedures of the SBI and the state Crime Lab until an avalanche of bad publicity and multiple lawsuits were threatened.

    "The one thing we saw over and over again was that the problems stemmed from Attorney General Roy Cooper's office, the SBI, and the Crime Lab," stated Sen. Goolsby, the former chair of the oversight committee responsible for all departments dealing with law enforcement. "We actually had agents coming into the General Assembly asking for leadership within the department. Because of those problems, we made the state Crime Lab it's own agency and removed the SBI from Cooper's purview."

    In recent weeks, Cooper has falsely claimed that he fixed the Crime Lab since the 2010 exposé. Statistics from the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts found that the median murder case takes almost two years to conclude, nearly double what it was when Cooper took office. Equally alarming is the median sexual assault case takes over 450 days to conclude, removing credibility of Cooper's claim that the backlog has been fixed. Just this month, it was reported that a UNC-Chapel Hill student had submitted a rape kit seven months ago that hadn't been tested yet.

    "I'm here to say that I was there, I saw what happened, and we acted because it had to be done," continued Goolsby. "We deserved better at the time, we deserve better now, and we deserve better than Roy Cooper in the future."

    For further details or media inquiries please contact Emily Weeks at emily.weeks@ncgop.org or (910)544-9726.

• Contact: NCGOP Communications
•     communications@ncgop.org