Streamlining New York’s Discovery laws is essential to protecting victims. There are currently so many ways to have domestic violence cases dismissed it has turned out that perpetrators of these crimes have had a good chance that they will not be held accountable, and let free. Hundreds of cases have been thrown out over minor paperwork issues, and now Governor Hochul, recognizing the consequences can be tragic, is throwing her political weight behind streamlining the discovery process, saying she won’t make any state budget deal without fixing discovery laws. Automatic case dismissals over insignificant technicalities, that don’t really cause harm to a defense, have resulted in 94% of the cases having been dismissed in NYC in 2023 and almost 50% were dismissed in the State outside our city.
Discovery reforms were passed in the State in 2019 and the results have been disastrous. Cases where one of the many body cam footages was not uploaded in a timely manner, one piece of duplicative paperwork was missing and a ‘command log’ was not included in the paperwork are being used as examples by the Governor of how so many of these laws fail to adequately account for ‘common sense’ protection of the thousands of victims of domestic abuse.
The Governor’s plan to streamline discovery has gotten support from district attorneys and a dozen victim rights organizations around the State, religious leaders and more. Discovery laws are a slippery slope according to attorneys and judges we have spoken with. Automatic dismissals have, and always will be, available to criminal defense attorneys, but we have to encourage our local State legislators to look at repealing these laws now. We applaud Hochul for claiming that she won’t agree to a State budget without fixing what she sees as a ‘fatal flaw’ in the law.
