Hochul and NYC DAs Celebrate Success of Discovery Laws Resulting in Numerous Criminal Case Dismissals

It’s a brand new discovery.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City’s five district attorneys ran a victory lap Wednesday on a revamp to the state’s discovery laws included in a sprawling budget bill.

The changes will prevent criminal cases from being thrown out over trivial mistakes and narrow how much evidence prosecutors must turn over to defense attorneys.

Hochul, speaking alongside the district attorneys at Manhattan’s state courthouse, had refused to budge on the issue — which caused a weeks-long impasse on the overall mammoth budget deal.

“I said all along I would hold up a $250 billion budget on this issue,” she said.

“And here’s why: behind all the legal jargon that some may not quite comprehend, there’s real peoples’ lives at stake here.”

“You can’t have violent criminals who hurt other human beings be able to walk free because of evidence that was irrelevant might have been excluded.”

Big Apple prosecutors groused for years that 2019 reforms to the state’s evidence-sharing laws — which were passed because many New Yorkers languished in jail awaiting trial on often-minor criminal charges — had led to a surge in case dismissals.

The reforms’ onerous requirements forced prosecutors to turn over massive amounts of evidence, they complained.

Failing to turn over even inconsequential evidence led to accused criminals — including a man who allegedly beat his girlfriend and ripped off her clothes in front of his friends — walking free on technicalities, prosecutors argued.

The deal struck by Hochul and state lawmakers would, according to the governor’s office:

• Require courts to consider the prosecutor’s efforts as a whole and whether missing evidence prejudiced the defense — an effort to prevent cases from being thrown out over insignificant mistakes;
• Narrow the scope of what evidence prosecutors must turn over so not to include frivolous materials that have no real weight on the case
• Clarify that cases should only be dismissed by judges if prosecutors did not exercise “due diligence”
• Require defense attorneys to challenge a prosecutor’s certification that they’ve completed discovery effort within 35 days

“In broad strokes what the bill does is requires us to turn over materials as quickly and as efficiently as we can,” said Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon.

“If the defense has objections, they have to make those objections within 35 days,” McMahon said.