New York’s Legislature does not care about domestic violence victims.
That’s what the state Senate and Assembly signaled last week when they omitted from their budget drafts any amendments to New York’s radical, unjust discovery law.
The 2020 discovery statute created the largest unnecessary compliance burden on prosecutors in the entire nation — sharply advantaging criminal defendants over crime victims.
The law enumerates types of evidence (known as “discovery” material) assistant district attorneys must collect, review and share with defense attorneys within very narrow time frames. Otherwise, their cases are dismissed.
Unfortunately for victims, the definition of “evidence” now includes anything remotely connected to a case — even if it’s completely irrelevant or redundant.
This has led to skyrocketing dismissal rates as defense attorneys play “gotcha” and scrounge up meaningless bits of “evidence” prosecutors missed.
It’s denied justice to tens of thousands of crime victims.
In 2019, prior to the law, only 5% of cases prosecuted in New York City criminal court were dismissed because prosecutors couldn’t meet their compliance burden in time.
But the new threshold is impossible to meet; by last year, these forced dismissals had risen a simply shocking 455%.
That’s right: around 50,000 cases — nearly a third of the total — were dismissed because defense attorneys successfully claimed prosecutors hadn’t met the stupid and unattainable new definition of compliance.
It’s been absolutely disastrous for domestic violence victims, whose cases are particularly vulnerable to these baloney dismissals.
Prosecutors, attempting to prevent dismissals, are so overwhelmed with chasing meaningless “evidence” that they are forced simply to decline to prosecute 26% more domestic violence arrests than in 2019.
Stomach this: A tragic two out of five NYC domestic violence victims now have their cases either dismissed or declined.
One of these victims was Maya Calver (names changed for safety).
In the past few weeks, the law’s absurdities threw Maya’s life into needless danger and upheaval when the case against her abuser, Mark Davis, was dismissed for an idiotic, unjust reason.
Davis, Maya’s live-in boyfriend, had a long history of assaults against her. Police intervened in several such incidents over the past year.
He was finally arrested in August when he forcibly stripped her naked in public and beat her. Davis was charged with multiple counts of assault, aggravated harassment, and sex abuse — and mountains of evidence supported his guilt.
Manhattan prosecutors rapidly turned over to Davis’ attorneys everything the scrupulous law demands, including 10 body-worn camera videos from the arrest date, with audit trails for metadata associated with each camera.
They also assembled hundreds of items from 70 different evidence categories: police, witness, court and prosecutorial reports, scans, checklists, logs, rosters, slips, notes, receipts, photos, tickets, emails, voicemails, forms and referrals.
Prosecutors shared disciplinary records for Davis’ arresting officers, too.
But they initially missed the citation paperwork for a trivial past incident in which a prisoner briefly escaped when one of these cops escorted him to a water fountain.
The prisoner was re-apprehended after 20 seconds. Indeed, NYPD’s meticulous reporting standards is the only reason the incident was even recorded.
Yet Davis’ defense counsel pounced. Prosecutors, they complained, had not turned over those obscure documents recording this completely insignificant incident until after the discovery law’s time frame. (The testimony of the cop in question wasn’t even necessary!)
Because this law puts compliance above justice, the entire case was dismissed: Maya’s abuser walks free as a bird.
Not only that, the dismissal meant Maya can’t even get an order of protection against Davis, who continues to harass her.
Fearful and utterly failed by the system meant to deliver her justice, Maya has moved from her home.
There are likely thousands of victims like Maya in NYC . . . and counting.
In 2019, before the discovery law, the city achieved nearly 12,000 misdemeanor convictions for assorted offenses — but over the following four years, it averaged barely over 3,000 convictions per year.
This means only a quarter of victims now get the just satisfaction the system used to provide.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed an amendment to the law that, among other things, would make defense attorneys prove that any overlooked “evidence” could actually affect the outcome of a case for a dismissal to result.
Under this amendment, Mark Davis would have faced justice for violently, repeatedly abusing his girlfriend.
Over the past weeks of budget debates, “progressive” legislators and advocates have argued that because dismissal rates for indicted felonies — think heinous murders and shootings — have not skyrocketed under the discovery law, everything is fine.
They are so desperate to set criminals free and demonize law enforcement that they don’t care how many abused women live in fear.
In no other state in the union would Maya have been denied her day in court.
New York’s Legislature needs to shake off its self-congratulatory, anti-prosecutor nonsense and enact Hochul’s amendment before the April 1 budget deadline. Until then, our lawmakers should be ashamed.
Hannah E. Meyers is a policing and public safety policy expert and former New York Police Department senior counterterrorism analyst.
