The leaders of the state Legislature have yet to fully endorse Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bid to reshape New York’s twisted evidence laws — even as her plan sees a surge of bipartisan support.
Hochul’s proposal — which she argues would help stop criminal cases from being dismissed over “technicalities” — faces an uncertain fate with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Westchester) in Albany.
Heastie said Tuesday that Assembly members broadly agree so-called discovery laws need to be tweaked, but are still haggling over details during the ongoing state budget negotiations.
He expressed concern that some of the Hochul-backed changes would give prosecutors too much power.
“I’m not pro-defendant, I’m not pro-prosecutor,” he said. “I’m pro-justice, wanting a fair exchange of discovery and let the wheels of justice turn. But I think the conversation is in a very good place.”
The state budget deadline is technically April 1, but lawmakers have blown past it in the past amid discussions on contentious topics such as bail reform.
Neither Heastie nor Stewart-Cousins included Hochul’s proposed discovery changes in their one-house budget proposals for this year.
And Stewart-Cousins has said amendments to the discovery laws should happen outside the budget talks, The New York Times reported.
Hochul, for her part, has thrown her support behind a crusade by prosecutors across the state to roll back aspects of discovery laws that were changed in 2019’s wave of criminal-justice reforms signed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and enacted the following year.
Her proposal would narrow the scope of evidence that is required to be turned over to the defense. It would also set a timeline for defendants to challenge whether prosecutors are in full compliance and grant judges more leeway on how to sanction prosecutors who run afoul of the rules, short of dismissing a case in its entirety.
District attorneys across New York — including all five in the city — have argued the onerous requirements on turning over evidence have led to a rash of case dismissals because the laws impose strict penalties on even minor mistakes.
Dismissals in the Big Apple have shot up from 42% before the reforms to 62% in 2023, Office of Court Administration data show.
The cause led a rally Tuesday with three Big Apple district attorneys — Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, Brooklyn’s Eric Gonzalez and Queens’ Melinda Katz — standing alongside business leaders with the Partnership for New York City.
The lefty Bragg, who has been accused of being soft-on-crime, recounted cases that were dismissed because of a missing Uber receipt and a police officer’s log book not being turned over.
One alleged abuser who violently stripped off his girlfriend’s clothes in front his friends walked free because prosecutors turned over a single piece of evidence late, Bragg recently complained.
Gonzalez pinned the surging dismissals squarely on discovery laws, often because of information that’s not relevant to the cases.
“They have skyrocketed in New York City, in part because there is no forgiveness of any missing paper,” he said.
“What we’re asking for is for proportionality, for a case not to be dismissed because non-relevant information is turned over past that deadline.”
The event unfolded just hours before Republican state lawmakers held a news conference with Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly in Albany expressing their own in support of changing the laws.
Donnelly called Hochul’s proposed changes a “good first step,” as she argued discovery laws make people “less safe.”
“It’s a disgrace that a case, an important case, would be dismissed” due to a technicality, she told reporters.
But changing the discovery laws also faces fierce opposition from criminal-justice advocates, public defenders and other aligned groups such as the NAACP, who’ve coalesced into the Alliance To Protect Kalief’s Law — named after Kalief Browder, who committed suicide after spending years at Rikers Island awaiting trial for stealing a backpack.
Kalle Condliffe, senior staff attorney at The Legal Aid Society, argued Hochul’s proposals amount to a gutting of Kalief’s Law, meant to keep defendants from languishing in jail while awaiting trial.
She said tying the discovery rules — which set strict deadlines that prosecutors disclose evidence within 35 days in most cases — to the state’s speedy trials requirement is “what gives the law meaning.”
Prosecutors will be able to work around the provisions in the governor’s proposal to maliciously influence cases, she argued.
“It’s not about the judges and, to be clear, it’s not a lack of trust,” Condliffe said. “It’s that any party in an adversarial system is going to do the best for their side, according to the rules.”
State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt (R-Niagara), however, said the GOP conference won’t accept anything less than what Hochul has proposed.
“It’s like vanilla ice cream,” he said. “I don’t want a watered down vanilla ice cream.”
