A new ad from North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd is going on offense against his Democrat opponent Cheri Beasley’s record of being soft on crime.
Beasley served as the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court from 2019 to 2020. During her tenure, the state’s highest court ruled that it was unconstitutional to subject some repeat sex offenders to GPS tracking.
The case against the state was brought by Torrey Grady, who was convicted of anally raping a seven-year-old boy in 1996 and then raping and impregnating a fifteen-year-old girl in 2006.
As a recidivist, Grady was forced to wear an ankle monitor under North Carolina law. He was arrested again in 2017 for failing to register as a sex offender and change his address on file. In 2019, Beasley’s court ruled that tracking Grady’s whereabouts constituted an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment.
Budd’s ad, which was obtained by The Spectator, hits Beasley for voting against the state law allowing tracking of sex offenders after they leave prison.
“A serial child rapist set free,” the ad says. “Where he’s going, nobody knows, because Cheri Beasley struck down a bipartisan law requiring GPS tracking for child predators.”
Grady, the ad goes on, is “a monster who raped a seven-year-old boy in front of his little brother and impregnated a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“Now, he could be watching your kids. Who’s to blame? Cheri Beasley. Liberal decisions, dangerous consequences,” the video closes.
Democratic attorney general Josh Stein argued in favor of the sex offender tracking law in front of the North Carolina Supreme Court. The law was passed in 2007 by the Democrat-controlled North Carolina General Assembly.
“Even if (the) defendant has no reasonable expectation of privacy concerning where he lives because he is required to register as a sex offender, he does not thereby forfeit his expectation of privacy in all other aspects of his daily life,” Associate Justice Anita Earls wrote in the majority opinion narrowing the law.
The state is now only allowed to track individuals who are designated as sexually violent predators, had been convicted of an aggravated offense, or are adults convicted of statutory rape or sex offense of someone under the age of thirteen. Grady was convicted of a second-degree sex offense and taking indecent liberties with a child.
“Individuals like (Grady) … have no ongoing relationship with the state,” Earls argued.
Watch the ad:
