By Rachel Crumpler
A new preliminary report from a state-funded research group identifies “key pressure points that need to be addressed” to fully implement Iryna’s Law, which passed quickly late last year. The report also outlines some initial recommendations for lawmakers to help address existing gaps in North Carolina’s mental health and criminal justice systems.
The 37-page report, provided to state lawmakers on April 1, drew input from more than 20 stakeholder groups, including state agencies and professional associations. It identifies major challenges — including mental health treatment capacity, workforce shortages and legal system constraints — that could hinder implementation of Iryna’s Law.
The legislation was passed in response to the fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train in August 2025. Since then, a special House committee has met monthly to hear presentations and discuss solutions to address issues plaguing the state’s intertwined mental health and criminal justice systems.
“North Carolina is undertaking one of the most significant overhauls of its mental health and criminal justice systems in decades, with [Iryna’s Law] introducing changes with substantial operational, fiscal, and public safety implications,” said the report, published by the NC Collaboratory, a multi-disciplinary research group based at UNC Chapel Hill.
Iryna’s Law — House Bill 307 — sailed through the Republican-led legislature and took effect last December, tightening North Carolina’s pretrial release rules. Another provision in the law, which is scheduled to take effect in December 2026, orders more mental health evaluations to determine if people who are arrested should be involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment.
The man accused of killing Zarutska has a criminal history and severe mental health challenges. Since then, another high-profile case — the killing of Wake County teacher Zoe Welsh in January by a man with a history of mental illness — has intensified scrutiny of the gaps between the state’s mental health and criminal justice systems.
In recent months, state health officials, hospital administrators and sheriffs have repeatedly told lawmakers on the House Select Committee on Involuntary Commitment and Public Safety that Iryna’s Law adds demands to already overburdened systems. Iryna’s Law did not, however, add more mental health funding; some view that gap as a critical flaw.
Lawmakers did allocate more than $2 million for more assistant district attorneys and legal assistants in Mecklenburg County. Lawmakers also provided $1 million to the NC Collaboratory to study the intersection of the mental health and criminal justice systems for juveniles and adults in North Carolina. The collaboratory was formed in 2016 by the General Assembly to harness the expertise of university researchers to address state and local government issues.
The NC Collaboratory identified two priority areas for lawmakers ahead of the General Assembly short session that starts later this month: getting better data across the health and criminal justice systems, and sustaining research to evaluate implementation of the law and guide further policy development.
Not enough data
The report bluntly states that North Carolina has an “informatics issue that will prevent the successful implementation” of the new law. Health and criminal justice data are generally isolated from one another, which limits data sharing and access.
As a result, law enforcement officials often can’t get health information that could inform their decision-making, and health providers lack useful insight into a person’s criminal history.
“There’s asymmetrical information” that can be a major limitation, said Sam Thompson, executive director of the Health Information Exchange Authority at the N.C. Department of Information Technology, during the March meeting of the House Select Committee on Involuntary Commitment and Public Safety.
“We’ve thought of one role that could really access both these data as it currently stands, and that would be something like a jail nurse — someone that is both within a law enforcement setting and also is a HIPAA-protected entity,” he said.
According to the report, North Carolina officials cannot comprehensively assess the current landscape of programs serving justice-involved people who have serious mental health needs, along with patterns of involuntary commitments in North Carolina.
“We’re having to do a lot of thinking of what changes might have to be made to data systems to enable aggregation and trend forecasting that will be useful to implement Iryna’s Law,” said Liza Rodler from the NC Collaboratory, who is helping oversee research related to the law.
Improving the state’s data will require sustained effort over time, the report states. The NC Collaboratory recommended designating one state agency to lead data coordination, improve data flow and navigate the legal restrictions that come with accessing certain data. The report also called for policy changes adding new data reporting requirements so critical information is consistently collected — particularly related to the involuntary commitment process.
Since Iryna’s Law passed, lawmakers have looked harder at involuntary commitment processes for potential reforms. However, they don’t have basic relevant information — like how many involuntary commitment petitions there are or how many are upheld by judges.
Right now, the best data on commitment petitions is based on county-level data collected over several months and reported by NC Health News in 2022. The data shows requests for involuntary commitments had been on the rise in North Carolina, increasing from about 54,000 in 2011 to more than 106,000 in 2021. But that data translates to the number of requests for commitment orders, not the number of people. North Carolina also lacks information on how far people make it through the commitment process and how long their involuntary treatment lasts.
NC Health News has shared the data with multiple researchers who have requested it when they realized comprehensive data was not available from state agencies. This same data was cited in Gov. Josh Stein’s February Executive Order No. 33 that seeks to strengthen the behavioral health and criminal justice systems.
Research underway
The NC Collaboratory has awarded $1.08 million to researchers at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke to conduct nine research studies. The studies will examine a range of intersections between the mental health and criminal justice systems — from initial responses to behavioral health crises, to the availability of jail-based behavioral health services, to reforms to involuntary inpatient and outpatient commitment.
The studies are just getting underway, but the results are expected to inform the group’s final report to lawmakers, which is due March 1, 2027. Anticipated topics include:
- Options for reforming involuntary commitment laws
- Ways to improve coordination in behavioral health crisis response
- Guidance for county implementation of pretrial electronic monitoring
- Informing evidence-based minimum standards for behavioral health care in county detention facilities
- Promising practices in reentry planning
- Strategies to address the mental health needs of justice-involved youth
While the new studies aim to address some of the urgent questions about implementation of Iryna’s Law, the report says more research will be needed to fully understand other challenges created by the law. Those include bottlenecks in inpatient and outpatient treatment options, as well as staffing shortages and operational strains among health providers and law enforcement — issues that fall outside the scope of the current projects.
“As State agencies and counties make changes to implement new requirements under [Iryna’s Law], independent and ongoing evaluation will be essential to determine what works, identify emerging challenges, and assess impacts on public safety, system performance, and individual outcomes,” the report says, noting that such research “would strengthen accountability and support effective use of public resources.”
To support that effort, the report recommends that lawmakers establish and fund an Office of Health and Justice Research within the NC Collaboratory to coordinate ongoing research on the intersecting fields of health and criminal justice.
“This issue isn’t going anywhere,” said Jeni Corn from the NC Collaboratory, who oversees the group’s social sciences research. She said researchers are full of additional research ideas.
After months of hearing from stakeholders, members of the House Committee on Involuntary Commitment and Public Safety plan to release a report with their recommendations and findings — including potential policy tweaks to Iryna’s Law — during its meeting April 14.
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