A unanimous three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals has ruled that the estates of three victims of the state’s eugenics program are not entitled to payments from North Carolina’s eugenics compensation fund.
It was the second time the Appeals Court had addressed the cases. In the first round, the Appeals Court had argued that it had no jurisdiction to address the case. The N.C. Supreme Court disagreed and called for the Appeals Court to review the case on its merits.
The case involved families of eugenics victims who had died in 1996, 2006, and 2010. All three died before the June 30, 2013, cutoff date set in a state law designed to compensate living victims of the eugenics program.
Writing for the three-judge panel, Chief Judge Linda McGee explained, “the Compensation Program contains both specific and inferred evidence that the General Assembly intended to provide compensation to those identified sterilization victims who were still living, and to exclude the heirs of those victims who had already died. In short, the Compensation Program seems to have been designed in accordance with the stated goals of certain members of the General Assembly, and the Final Report of the Task Force, to provide restitution to the living survivors of involuntary asexualization or sterilization by the Eugenics Board.”
