News & Views

Duke Law Professor Brandon Garrett (Courtesy photo)

There are a lot of reasons that the death penalty is almost never imposed anymore. Not only is it hugely and uniquely expensive to apply and proven to be of no use in deterring crime, but stacks of evidence also confirm it has long been applied unjustly. Tragically, the death penalty is mostly reserved for cases involving defendants who are poor and of color and victims who are white and there are many cases in which the horror of innocent people being sentenced to death has occurred.

Both President Biden and former Gov. Roy Cooper lent further momentum to the death penalty’s slow but steady decline recently with a series of death row commutations, and as Newsline learned in a recent conversation with the head of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University Law School, Professor Brandon Garrett, we’ve reached a point here in North Carolina and around the country at which the death penalty’s full abolition is now on the horizon.

Click here to listen to our full interview with Garrett.

Jennifer Roberts (Courtesy photo)

Last week the nation paused to honor the life and legacy of former President Jimmy Carter. Carter died December 29, 2024 at the age of 100, and while opinions vary as to how successful his one term in the White House was, there’s a widespread consensus that no president in American history enjoyed a more productive or successful post-presidency.

In an array of important areas – promoting democracy and fair elections, combating poverty and disease, championing human rights – Carter worked long, hard, successfully and with great humility to build a better world. And recently NC Newsline got a chance to discuss some of that work with someone who knows it intimately – the co-leader of the Carter Center’s Strengthening Democracy Project in North Carolina, former Charlotte mayor Jennifer Roberts.

Click here to listen to our full interview with Roberts.

Galen Bacharier (File photo)

A new year is upon us and with it, some important changes in state government. As a result of the November election, North Carolina now has several new leaders serving on its Council of State – most notably a new governor.

After eight years in the governor’s mansion and nearly 40 in elected office, Roy Cooper has exited public service – at least for a while – and turned over the reins of state government to his successor, Gov. Josh Stein. But before he departed, Cooper took a bit of a victory lap to celebrate his administration’s accomplishments and to drop some hints about what might be next in his career. And recently, I got a chance to discuss Cooper’s farewell, the possibility that he’ll seek another office next year, and some of the things that North Carolinians can expect from the Stein administration in a conversation I had with my colleague, NC Newsline politics reporter Galen Bacharier.

Click here to listen to the full interview.

Read more of Galen Bacharier’s reporting here.

Kody Kinsley, outgoing secretary of the NC Department of Health and Human Services. (Photo: DHHS)

Gov. Roy Cooper’s second four-year term as our state’s chief executive has come to a close, and if there’s one accomplishment from that period that stands out above all others it was his tireless and ultimately successful campaign to expand the state’s Medicaid program – a move that has saved and will continue to save, quite literally, thousands of lives.

Of course, the work to secure Medicaid expansion and its successful implementation was far more than a one-person job. It took hundreds of committed and hardworking state employees to make it happen and the person in charge of that effort on a day-to-day basis was the state’s outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kody Kinsley.

Kinsley served as HHS secretary for the final three years of Cooper’s term, and as NC Newsline learned in a recent conversation with him as he prepared leave office, while he’s enormously satisfied with how Medicaid expansion has gone, he’s also proud of some other accomplishments that will make life better for millions of our state’s most vulnerable residents.

Click here to listen to the full interview.

Steven Troxler, commissioner of the NC Department of Agriculture, details the damage caused by Hurricane Helene (Photo: NCGA Screengrab)

If there was one story that dominated the news this past year – aside from the election – and left a lasting imprint on North Carolina, it was Hurricane Helene.

The storm ravaged western North Carolina in late September causing an estimated $58 billion in damage.

Unfortunately, the Republican-controlled legislature passed only modest relief measures in the fall, while pledging that more help would be coming from the federal government in the new year, but that remains in the distance.

Meanwhile, the looming question is whether many of affected businesses and households will be able to hang-on until then.

State Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler told House lawmakers earlier this month that the only way he could describe this year was “absolutely awful.”

One industry that makes its money in December and was left reeling by Helene is the state’s Christmas tree industry. Rodney Buchanan, president of the NC Christmas Trees Association, told lawmakers few people appreciate how specialized this business is – and how hard it will be for these family farms to recover.

In this segment, we revisit some of the testimony from a recent legislative hearing highlighted the devastating impacts that Hurricane Helene had on agriculture, and we’ll hear some of the powerful testimony.

Rep. Pricey Harrison (Photo: NCGA)

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina is rightfully provoking calls for more action than has been forthcoming from state and federal lawmakers, and one area in which one hopes such demands will bear fruit is in planning and prevention. Regrettably, state Republican legislative leaders have repeatedly blocked legislation and rules, and overrode gubernatorial vetoes, designed to protect against the impacts of hurricanes and other storms.

Thankfully, advocates have long identified and championed policies that would better prepare our state for the storms that will inevitably come our way (and also combat the climate change that’s helping to drive them) and one of the most knowledgeable is State Rep. Pricey Harrison of Guilford County. And as Rep. Harrison told Newsline during a conversation we had in October, it’s her hope that Hurricane Helene will finally spur her colleagues to action in this long-neglected area.

This is a rebroadcast of our interview that originally aired on October 13, 2024

Jason Kanawati Stephany, Vice President of Communications & Public Policy at Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina

This year’s election may have come and gone, but one thing that hasn’t gone anywhere in North Carolina this year is hunger. Especially since congressional Republicans blocked the reauthorization of some key social safety net programs that led to great success during the pandemic, food insecurity has expanded to the point at which more than 560,000 people in our region alone fit this troubling description.

And with the recent devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene, things have been even more dire in western North Carolina – a fact that has led the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina to ship truckloads of goods to the mountains. Earlier this week, we learned more about this effort, the work of the food bank more generally and the need for average folks to become anti-hunger advocates in a conversation with the food bank’s Vice President of Communications and Public Policy, Jason Kanawati Stephany.

Click here to learn more about how you can contribute.

This is a rebroadcast of our interview that originally aired on November 10, 2024.

Stateline Reporter Alex Brown (Photo of offshore wind project by John Moore/Getty Images)

As the world races to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon pollution in order to combat the climate change crisis, one enormously promising source of non-polluting energy is offshore wind. Indeed, numerous East Coast states are counting on offshore wind projects to power tens of millions of homes and to help them transition to cleaner energy.

Unfortunately, as Alex Brown, a national environmental reporter for the website Stateline recently reported, putting wind turbines at sea requires the cooperation of a powerful landlord: the federal government. And soon, that government will be led by President-elect Donald Trump, who has frequently disparaged offshore wind and said he will quote “make sure that ends on Day 1.” Last week, NC Newsline caught up with Brown to learn more about where things stand.

Click here to access the full podcast with Alex Brown.

Alexandra Sirota (Photo: NC Budget & Tax Center)

A new law enacted by North Carolina Republican legislators that purports to be about Hurricane Helene relief is, for the most part, anything but. Rather than providing desperately needed relief and recovery dollars to devastated families and businesses, Senate Bill 382 is a 131-page power grab bill that seizes duties from newly elected Democrats and shifts them to Republicans.

What’s more, as NC Newsline learned in a recent conversation with Alexandra Sirota – the executive director of the nonpartisan North Carolina Budget and Tax Center — the new law is sadly emblematic of a decade-long pattern in which legislators have repeatedly focused on accumulating power and helping the well-off while neglecting opportunities to make life better for average North Carolinians.

Click here to access the full podcast.

Erica Palmer Smith (File photo)

North Carolina remains plagued by a destructive child care crisis that has left many families without options and numerous providers hanging on by a thread.

And while basic concerns for children and families should provide plenty of incentive for state leaders to tackle the problem, a new report compiled by experts at the state Department of Commerce and the children’s advocacy group NC Child, provides another compelling reason: the economy. The report finds that if North Carolina adequately funded child care, the state would realize billions of dollars in new economic activity and create thousands of new jobs. And recently we caught up with the executive director of NC Child, Erica Palmer Smith, to learn more about the report and her group’s other legislative priorities for 2025.

Click here to access the full podcast.