NC Dem Senate Candidate Appointed Convicted Gang Member to Justice Task Force

In 2020, as protests over George Floyd's death swept the country, Roy Cooper, then the governor of North Carolina, created a task force by executive order to examine racial equity in the criminal justice system. He staffed it with state officials and community activists, including Kerwin Pittman, a man who had spent fourteen years in prison after being convicted in 2007 of conspiracy to commit murder. Prosecutors had identified Pittman as a ranking member of the Bloods gang. The appointment, revealed by the Washington Free Beacon, has become a flashpoint in Cooper's current campaign for Senate.

Pittman's criminal history is substantial. In 2006, he was convicted in a drive-by shooting that killed Jamel Amiens Jeffreys, a nineteen-year-old. The conviction led to his fourteen-year sentence. During a separate murder trial for another Bloods member, prosecutors explicitly labeled Pittman a ranking member of the gang. At the time Cooper appointed him to the task force, Pittman was working for Emancipate NC, an organization that has called for the abolition of police and has written that maintaining white supremacy has always been the goal of policing.

Pittman has defended his role on the task force, arguing that his past should not disqualify him from contributing to reform conversations. Now thirty-nine years old, he told the Free Beacon that he was invited to participate because of his lived experience and his community work. He acknowledged that his gang involvement and criminal conduct occurred when he was a teenager and young man, before age nineteen, and that he spent more than a decade incarcerated as a result of decisions he made then. The implication in his statement is that his decade-plus in prison, combined with his subsequent work in communities, gives him credible standing to discuss how the criminal justice system functions.

Cooper is running for Senate against Michael Whatley, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. When asked about the Pittman appointment, Cooper's campaign did not defend the choice directly. Instead, they pivoted to Whatley's record, stating that while Cooper spent his career prosecuting rapists and violent criminals and signing tough-on-crime laws as governor, Whatley appointed a convicted child sex predator to a top role in the North Carolina Republican Party. That person had served six years in prison and spent over a decade as a registered sex offender, the campaign said, and the appointment gave him access to events with children.

The appointment sits at the intersection of two competing narratives about criminal justice in America. One holds that people with direct experience of incarceration and the system's failures bring essential insight to reform efforts. The other suggests that appointing someone with Pittman's specific history—a gang member convicted of murder—to a state task force raises legitimate questions about judgment and priorities. Cooper created the task force in a moment of national reckoning on policing and race. Pittman's inclusion reflected a particular philosophy about who should shape that conversation. The revelation of his background, weeks before a competitive Senate election, has turned a staffing decision from 2020 into campaign fodder, with both candidates now trading accusations about their respective appointments of people with criminal records.