What with all the hullabaloo over whether to modestly adjust reformed bail laws — a step the New York Legislature should surely take, along the lines wisely outlined by Gov. Kathy Hochul — another important tweak to criminal justice statutes has flown under the radar. New York’s discovery laws demand attention, and adjustment.
Discovery and speedy-trial statutes were necessarily overhauled in 2019. The old system let thousands of people languish for months or years on end, and too often meant that defendants didn’t see the strength of the evidence against them before they were effectively coerced into guilty pleas. We proudly championed changes.
Though light-years better, the new system makes one large mistake: requiring that prosecutors turn over “all items and information that relate to the subject matter of the case” before the speedy trial alarm sounds. For lower-level misdemeanors, prosecutors have 60 days; for higher-level misdemeanors, they have 90 days; for felonies, they have six months. No other state requires all such material to be produced on such a strict timetable.
The required consequence of a failure to comply? The case is dismissed. District attorneys say that the result is cases are getting thrown out because of genuinely inconsequential failures to swiftly share hard-to-run-down files that are redundant or add nothing to a case, such as the bodycam footage for a late-arriving officer who merely did a walk-through the scene.
Under proposed fixes, defendants will still get all this evidence before trial — but what’s required by the speedy trial deadline would be “substantial compliance” with discovery obligations, which is to say the evidence the government is using to prove its case.
No one wants to return to the days when the accused are in the dark about the government’s case, but the new law, as enforced, hands down draconian consequences for the slightest perceived oversight. That’s placing an unreasonable burden on those trying to make cases, particularly domestic violence cases, and denying victims a fair shot at justice for no good reason. Safeguard defendants’ rights without throwing a wrench in the gears of justice.
