By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-24 21:32:53 | Updated at 2025-04-05 15:35:50
1 week ago
New York’s skewed criminal justice laws have let domestic abusers walk free, Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday as she amped up her crusade to fix the onerous evidence-related mandates.
Hochul blamed the laws — which require prosecutors to speedily hand over a mass of discovery evidence to defense attorneys, or else have the case dismissed — for a statewide drop in domestic violence convictions.
Those convictions stood at 31% when the laws were passed in 2019, but now stand at 6% — depriving victims of both safety and justice, Hochul contended.
“We can no longer turn a blind eye to their cries for help,” she said following a roundtable discussion in Albany, during which she met with domestic violence and sexual assault survivors.
“The choice between fair and speedy trials, which are important objectives, but also letting dangerous abusers off the hook, is a false choice,” Hochul said. “We must do both.”
Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is now running for New York City’s mayor, signed the tweaks to state discovery practices — which were designed to speed up court proceedings so criminal defendants, such as Kalief Browder, wouldn’t languish behind bars waiting for trial.
Prosecutors, however, have argued the reforms led to criminal-case dismissals in New York City spiking from 41% to 62%.
Even lefty Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has backed tweaking the discovery laws.
He argued the laws recently let an accused domestic abuser — who allegedly beat his girlfriend and stripped off her clothes in front of his friends — to walk free on a technicality.
“This horrifying example is illustrative of a much broader problem where survivors are being denied justice and orders of protection, leaving them vulnerable to their attackers,” Bragg said.
Hochul and all five Big Apple district attorneys are pushing for changes to the discovery laws in the upcoming state budget.
Joyce Miller, who runs the domestic violence bureau in the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, on Monday recounted a case that was dismissed after prosecutors found a voicemail between the victim and her alleged abuser.
The voicemail was discovered on the eve of trial and prosecutors immediately turned it over to defense attorneys, Miller said.
But she said the lawyers were able to successfully argue under the law that the case should be dismissed on a technicality.
“It’s very heartbreaking because that victim lost an order of protection,” Miller said. “She lost her faith in the criminal justice system and she is exactly who is in need of this type of discovery reform.”
The Legal Aid Society, meanwhile, argued that Hochul is peddling blatant falsehoods in her push.
Attorneys with the group have contended criminal-case dismissals outside the five boroughs have largely remained the same since the reforms. They pin the blame on NYPD officers failing to produce evidence on time.
“There is no evidence that thousands of domestic violence cases have been dismissed based on ‘technicalities,'” a statement from the group reads. “The Governor relies on cherry picked anecdotes, without documentation from cases where the NYPD failed to comply with the discovery law. Using these anecdotes and survivors of domestic violence to justify rolling back laws that protect fundamental fairness also ignores the reality that too many survivors are criminalized themselves, facing charges, in need of access to the evidence against them.”
