Trump claims former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper let out 88 murderers during Covid, and argues it ‘would have been okay’ if they had died

At a campaign rally in Kentucky on Saturday, President Donald Trump brought up a decades-old criminal case while criticizing how some states handled prisoners during the Covid pandemic, according to Mediaite. He focused on decisions made by former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and compared them to a well-known episode from the 1988 presidential race.

Trump told the crowd that Governor Mike Dukakis had allowed a man named Willie Horton out of prison while running for president. He said Horton then went on to kill three women and rape them in rapid succession. Trump added that Dukakis held a 15-point lead at the time, and that the lead flipped to a double-digit deficit within roughly two days.

The president then shifted to Cooper. He said the former governor released 88 murderers during the pandemic because he did not want them to get sick. Trump described many of the men as being held under very strict conditions and noted that some were essentially on death row. He argued they were healthy and unlikely to face serious risk from the virus.

Civil Rights lawsuit led to North Carolina’s prisoner release deal

Trump said the men “were not going to die. And if they did, I guess that would have been okay.” He told the audience the decision was worse than the Horton case under Dukakis. He claimed that 25 of the 88 people released went on to kill someone almost right away, based on figures from a month or two earlier, and suggested more such crimes may have followed.

Trump stated that the men were murderers and that people, including what he called the “fake news,” prefer not to talk about the outcome. He presented the releases as an example of protecting convicted killers at the expense of public safety. He has made similar claims about the state’s crime rate, though FBI data on North Carolina crime tells a different story. The remarks drew laughter from people at the rally.

Accounts of the Horton case differ from the version Trump offered. Horton was already serving a life sentence for the 1974 murder of a 15-year-old boy during a robbery. In 1986, he left a weekend furlough program, then raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé. Those details do not match the claim that he killed three women in quick succession.

Cooper’s administration faced a lawsuit from civil rights groups during the Covid era, a time which Trump fondly remembers. The groups said conditions in North Carolina prisons during the pandemic violated inmates’ constitutional rights. The state reached a settlement that called for the early release of 3,500 prisoners within six months. Of that larger group, 18 were later charged with murder.