More than 80 law professors on Tuesday urged state lawmakers to categorically reject Gov. Hochul’s proposed rollbacks to New York’s discovery reforms, saying they would gut progress and see pretrial defendants once again fighting their cases “in the dark.”
In a letter to state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Carl Heastie, the coalition of professors from Yale Law School, Hofstra University, St. John’s University, NYU, Cornell University, CUNY, Boston University, New York Law School and more said the proposed amendments would effectively repeal the 2020 reforms that required authorities to provide crucial evidence to defendants in time for them to prepare a defense properly.
They said it would return New York to an era when nearly all cases ended in plea deals and cops and prosecutors didn’t have to hand over anything until the eve of trial, seeing guilty pleas “secured by coercion, not evidence.”
“New Yorkers could not make informed decisions about their cases, investigate adequately, weigh plea offers, secure exculpatory evidence, or meaningfully prepare for trial before the last minute,” read Tuesday’s letter.
“The law bred a culture of gamesmanship that encouraged prosecutors to claim to be ready to proceed to trial even as they failed to provide evidence, including evidence that demonstrated the innocence of the accused, with essentially no legal accountability.”
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. (AP)
The governor and all of the city’s district attorneys want the 2020 discovery reforms amended so prosecutors would have unilateral control over the speedy trial clock, leaving them to largely be the judges of whether their efforts to provide evidence to the defense are reasonable.
The professors’ letter noted that was what occurred in the prosecution of Khalief Browder, a Bronx man who killed himself in 2015 after spending three years in pretrial custody on allegations he stole a backpack. The charges were eventually dropped.
“[Prosecutors] were able to prolong Browder’s case for years by repeatedly mouthing empty assertions of their readiness for trial as he languished in a cell on Rikers Island,” it read.
Hochul’s proposal would also stem the “free flow” of information currently required between police and prosecutors, limiting the DAs offices to being responsible only for what evidence they possess, which the coalition said would incentivize cops to withhold information and prosecutors to willfully avoid obtaining it if it doesn’t help their case. The governor also wants to give prosecutors the power to decide what to redact from evidence without a judge’s review.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and the city’s other DAs have asked the state legislature to pass Hochul’s proposals and say the rollbacks would not be drastic, nor absolve them of all of their obligations and ability to be sanctioned. They blame the reforms for a 51% increase in misdemeanor case dismissals and a 57% increase in felony cases being thrown out, and say people being released on technicalities are going on to commit more crimes.
“As tens of thousands of cases are being thrown out on minor technical grounds, delays resolving cases have surged, undermining public trust in the justice system and jeopardizing public safety,” the DAs wrote in a joint Times Union op-ed earlier this month.
“We want to be clear: These changes are not a rollback of reform or a return to the old laws that permitted disclosures on the eve of trial.”
The professors called the primary positions of the governor and the DAs “baseless.” They said they’re misrepresenting publicly available data and relying on a politics that defines public safety by conviction rates. Figures compiled by the State Office of Court Administration show that indicted felony dismissal rates remain virtually the same now as in 2020, the letter notes.
“The only increased dismissal rate in the state is for misdemeanors in local criminal courts in New York City, where over-policing of Black and brown communities has historically yielded high dismissal rates,” the letter reads.
“[Prior] conviction rates were artificially inflated because prosecutors wielded unfair threats and coerced pleas out of defendants who were in the dark about the evidence against them. Many pleaded guilty even in the face of factual innocence out of fear. The data does nothing to suggest that recidivism has increased, much less that New Yorkers are less safe than before the 2020 law went into effect.”
The News reached out to Stewart-Cousins and Heastie for comment.