Wake County will have the most understaffed prosecutor’s office in the state if North Carolina’s new budget plan becomes law.
It’s currently the third-worst in the state in terms of staffing levels, according to state judicial reports. But while the budget provides funding to hire new prosecutors in many other parts of the state, it ignores the state’s largest county, even as it continues to boom in population. The $34 billion budget plan passed the state legislature Thursday and is now before Democratic Gov. Josh Stein to review.
“It’s very bad for public safety in Wake County,” said Wiley Nickel, the Democratic candidate for Wake County District Attorney, who is running unopposed in November and likely to become the county’s top prosecutor next year.
“Victims are going to have to wait years, rather than months, for justice,” Nickel said in an interview. “Repeat offenders will stay out in the street much longer, things will fall through the cracks. And it deliberately targets Wake County.”
The budget provides a combined 11 new prosecutors to Cumberland and Robeson counties, previously the state’s most understaffed. It also funds new prosecutors in a dozen other counties better-staffed than Wake.
The state court system uses a combination of population levels and crime numbers to determine how many assistant district attorneys each prosecutorial district should have. Several are staffed above 100% of their needs, and many others are close. Wake County is at 64% of full staffing levels, according to the state’s 2025 report.
In real numbers, the state budget spends only enough money to fund 45 prosecutors in Wake County, even though the state judicial branch says the county needs 70.
Nickel noted how state lawmakers have recently asked district attorneys around the state to do more to get mentally ill criminal suspects committed to mental hospitals rather than released on bail. He questioned who would do all that extra work, when the average prosecutor in Wake County is already handling more than 2,400 cases per year.
“When I want to have someone involuntarily committed, I’m not going to have the staff to do it,” Nickel said. “And that could mean people in Wake County are more likely to be murdered because of this. That’s incredibly dangerous. You should never be playing politics with public safety.”
The state legislature is led by Republicans, and Wake County is among the most liberal counties in the state. In the legislature, Democrats hold 17 of the county’s 19 seats.
Nickel is a former state senator from Cary and also spent one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. After he won a competitive Triangle-area congressional seat in 2022, GOP state lawmakers redrew his district to make it lean heavily Republican, and he didn’t seek reelection in 2024.
Related to corruption investigations?
Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters this week that budget writers simply forgot to give Wake County more prosecutors, even as they were beefing up staffing across the state. But he said he’s been talking with longtime Sen. Dan Blue, D-Wake, about possibly addressing it in the future.
“By the time the budget got to where [House Speaker Destin Hall] and I were talking about it, those issues had pretty much been resolved,” Berger said. “It wasn’t on any of the lists that I was working from. But Senator Blue has raised the issue. We’re having some conversations about that.”
Some Democrats say the choice to keep Wake County prosecutors overworked wasn’t a mistake, but rather a deliberate decision. Nickel campaigned largely on a platform of ramping up investigations into political corruption — cases that are almost all handled out of the Wake County DA’s office, since it’s the state capitol.
“Perhaps it’s maybe a new, incoming new district attorney, who used to be in this chamber, who was a former colleague, who also said that he’s going after corruption,” said Sen. Sydney Batch, D-Wake. “And perhaps they don’t want him to have 10 more people to come after individuals in this building. To investigate.”
Nickel said he didn’t want to speculate on the reason why the county received no new prosecutors in the budget to help catch it up to the rest of the state. But he noted that current District Attorney Lorrin Freeman has been able to pursue some corruption cases even with her current staffing levels. Those types of cases tend to be more complex and require more time and resources than run-of-the-mill criminal cases.
In one such case, Freeman has charged four lobbyists with giving illegal gifts to Republican state lawmakers to sway public policy, after looking into a tour of Kentucky bourbon country that multiple state lawmakers took. She alleges it was paid for by companies in the liquor and gambling industries seeking favorable legislation.
“The current district attorney has active investigations and cases ongoing about public corruption that affect the legislature,” Nickel said. “It’s something certainly I campaigned on. And the people who decide how our office is funded are those people in the legislature. It makes for a very difficult position for the Wake DA.”
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