The legislative fixes Gov. Kathy Hochul got lawmakers to agree to in the budget they’re (finally) passing this week won’t fully solve New York’s troubles with crime and mental illness — but they’re a start.
Even if they had to be tucked into a jaw-dropping $254 billion spending plan that’ll squeeze taxpayers and rock the state’s fiscal footing.
Hochul got the Legislature to OK some small fixes to the “discovery” law, which dictates rules for prosecutors in gathering and sharing evidence with defense attorneys.
The 2019 “reforms” of that statute have allowed defense lawyers to get horrific crime cases tossed on ridiculous technicalities.
Now judges will have to evaluate prosecutors’ due diligence based on their overall efforts to gather all required categories of evidence — rather than each and every individual document.
Defense attorneys also now face a 35-day time limit to accuse prosecutors of failing to meet all the rules.
Alas, cases can still be dismissed for meaningless discovery “violations” even if they wouldn’t have affected a case’s outcome.
And New York judges, who too often favor perps over victims, will still have enormous discretion on what counts as a violation.
And what to do about it.
Hochul made more headway on expanding involuntary commitment of the mentally ill.
Her fixes allow authorities to hospitalize someone not only if he’s an imminent risk to himself or others, but also if he risks harm because of an “inability or refusal” to care for himself, due to his illness.
That’s true compassion; it gets people the help they need, even if they’re too sick to realize they need it.
It also helps protect the public from potential violence from mentally ill people not yet deemed an imminent threat.
Of course, the trick, on both discovery and involuntary-commitment, will be to get cops, prosecutors, judges, doctors and administrators to understand the new laws and implement them faithfully.
No criminal should be allowed to escape consequences based on irrelevant technical violations. And it’s critical to get people suffering from mental illness off the streets and into facilities that can best care for them.
Again, all this was stuffed into a quarter-trillion-dollar-plus budget that recklessly raises state-funded spending by 9.5%, more than three times inflation.
That ensures budget chaos later this year, when Uncle Sam chops federal aid to New York, not to mention revenue losses from any economic slowdown.
At least there’s some hope for making streets a bit safer and treating the mentally ill more humanely — if the authorities follow through.
