If Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley can’t come up with a better answer on crime, then her campaign may stall before she gets out of the general election gate.

Senate Republicans have launched another ad scorching Beasley as soft on crime based on her rulings as a state Supreme Court Justice. 

The new $1.7 million television buy is the third television advertisement from the National Republican Senatorial Committee attacking Beasley, as reported by NBC News.

“In stopping crime and holding criminals accountable, Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley has failed us,” says a female voice in the ad. The commercial highlights three of the court’s past rulings as being on the side of criminals not victims, including vacating a teen murderer’s death sentence and releasing a double murderer.

The narrator goes on to say, “Time after time, and case after case, Cheri Beasley protected criminals, not victims. How can we trust her to protect our families?”

As noted in a previous Woodshed piece, the Beasley campaign got a hollow victory when one small part of one television spot attacking her record became factually disputed and was pulled by some tv stations.

We noted at the time:

“The ad in question cites three cases, two of which Carolina Journal reported on. Only the third case, relying on a citation from a different media outlet, prompted the Beasley team’s complaint.

Think about that. Three accusations of being easy on child molesters and you can only question the truthfulness with regards to one of the three. Even then the Beasley complaints created all kinds of news articles linking and showing the ad to the public. Hardly a win for Beasley.”

This turned out to be an utter debacle on the part of the Beasley campaign when the group of television stations that pulled the ad declared they had made a mistake.

According to CBS News:

“A North Carolina TV station erred last week in taking down an ad against Democratic Senate candidate Cheri Beasley by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to a letter from an attorney for the station’s owners.”

The CBS article also confirms the NRSC did exactly what we predicted would happen in our previous piece:

“The NRSC is now running a tweaked version of the ad on the stations that initially took it down, while most in the state are still running the original version. “

As reported by NBC, a Beasley spokeswoman referenced those stations pulling the ad in her response to the NRSC’s latest spot.

“No voter will trust the NRSC’s desperate attacks after eight stations removed their ad for being ‘false’ and sheriffs across North Carolina called out their despicable lies,” Dory MacMillan said to NBC News. “This is the latest effort to lie about and distort Cheri’s record when the fact is she held dangerous offenders accountable.”

I find this to be a horrible response. Horrible and unsustainable. Yes, those stations took down the previous ad, briefly. Then they admitted a mistake.

Think about that. When a station takes down an ad questioning its truthfulness and then reverses course, it is the worst possible outcome. Stations don’t often get in these fights. Most political ads are both arguably true and arguably untrue, with the final judgment left to the voters. In this case, the Beasley campaign generated a bunch of news stories that called attention to the ad. The ad never really came down in any real sense. Now the TV stations are in essence vouching for the ad’s accuracy.

The latest ad spotlights three rulings, including one state Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that a man could not be placed back on death row. The man’s death sentence was commuted by Beasley and other court Democrats despite the law having been repealed by the state legislature. Beasley ruled that reimposing the death sentence would run afoul of double jeopardy protections. This is absurd. Double jeopardy has nothing to do with post-conviction sentencing. Beasley simply joined the efforts of legislative Democrats to end the death penalty against the wishes of the voters, and without the legislature ever having the guts to defy voters and actually vote to end the death penalty for double and triple murders, cop killers, and the worst evil known to man.

I wrote previously about three cases in which Beasley commuted death sentences for evil killers including a double cop killer.

This latest ad picked one of well over a hundred cases where Beasley spared the life of convicted killers against the verdicts of juries and with no claims the killers were innocent.

The second ruling involved Beasley’s decision in 2020 to order a new trial in the case of a man sentenced to 100 years in prison for crimes surrounding a shootout with Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers.

The third ruling referenced in the ad is a 2014 case in which Beasley wrote that a man convicted of two murders had a constitutional right to early release for “good behavior.”

Again, these are just three cases in which Beasley’s judgment is suspect. There are nearly 150 she took off death row alone. Not to mention other cases involving child molesters and wife beaters.

Is the Beasley campaign really going to keep up this charade of an argument about being tough on crime when the victims of these crimes start attacking her on camera?

Beasley has a couple of serious problems here. First, any candidate running for U.S. Senate based on a judicial record is going to have issues. As a conservative, I take Fourth Amendment search and seizure issues seriously. Sometimes the constitution requires charges and convictions to be tossed.

However, Beasley’s record is particularly troubling as we have outlined and her opponent will continue to highlight that fact.

Beasley needs to go a different route. She needs to spend several million dollars on a new TV commercial with the following script:

“Hi, I am Cheri Beasley. You are going to hear a lot about my time as a judge. You are going to hear about some tough rulings I made that you are going to hate. I hate them too. Sometimes I had to let some really bad people off the hook because the law and the Constitution require it.

We need people in the U.S. Senate, who respect the law and the constitution, even when they disagree with it. We need people in the U.S. Senate who make tough decisions people will not like because the Constitution demands it. If the Constitution requires it, then it is the right thing to do.

If you elect someone who has upheld the rights of horrific criminals, even when it disgusts them, you can definitely count on them to uphold your rights.”

Now I am not Cheri Beasley and she has not approved this message. But she better find an even better one. Because what she is saying now is not and will not work.

Editor’s note: This column was updated on June 22,2022 at 5:30pm.