With discovery law rollbacks looming, coalition launches to defend reforms
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Brooklyn legislator and mayoral candidate Zellnor Myrie introduced a bill this week to give district attorneys access to police departments’ and other agencies’ online databases to aid in discovery. File photo by Susan Watts/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
By Jacob Kaye
As lawmakers and district attorneys appear to flirt with the idea of rolling back the state’s discovery reforms, a coalition of public defense groups have joined up in an effort to protect the changes made to New York’s discovery statute half a decade ago.
Groups including the Legal Aid Society, Queens Defenders, St. John’s University School of Law Defense and Advocacy Clinic, the Innocence Project and over a dozen others launched the “Alliance to Protect Kalief’s Law” on Monday as the 2025 legislative session gets underway in Albany.
Representatives from the coalition said its formation is necessary as lawmakers and prosecutors across New York have hinted in recent months that they hope to scale back the reforms made to the state’s discovery laws in 2019. Any change to the laws could threaten the reform’s successes, the coalition said, including the quicker resolution of cases.
“There's been a lot of talk about the need to roll back discovery reform with framing that we believe is misleading,” said Amanda Jack, a policy director with the Legal Aid Society. “It was very important for us to get out in front of it and show the success of these laws and how they've been instrumental in preventing wrongful convictions and moving cases along.”
While reforms to the state’s bail laws have mostly dominated criminal justice policy conversations in New York since their passage in 2019, discovery reform, which was passed the same year, has seen similar controversy.
Nearly each year since the laws were enacted in 2020, lawmakers have attempted to scale back the reforms. On several occasions, they’ve been successful.
The reforms, which were passed without a funding mechanism to help DAs and defense attorneys implement them, required that prosecutors share the evidence they have against a defendant within a set time period. Prior to the reforms, defense attorneys said district attorneys across the state would sometimes wait until the eve of a trial to send the evidence over, leaving defendants at a major disadvantage.
The delay in evidence sharing also led to lengthy stays in jail for defendants awaiting trial, advocates said – the reforms were named after Kalief Browder, the Bronx man who committed suicide after being held in solitary confinement on Rikers Island for three years after being falsely accused of stealing a backpack.
But since the reforms’ passage, prosecutors have argued that the laws are too burdensome and have led to an increased workload and attrition rate for assistant district attorneys.
They’ve also argued that the law has been dangerous for New Yorkers. Should prosecutors violate the law, either by turning evidence over on time or by not turning over all the necessary evidence, a judge can dismiss the case. With the exception of 2020, dismissals for speedy trial violations increased in New York City in the years after the reforms passed, according to data provided by the Office of Court Administration.
In 2019, around 2,570 cases in New York were dismissed by judges for speedy trial violations, according to OCA data. That number jumped to 3,889 in 2023, the most recent year data is available.
In addition to data collected by OCA, the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services also collects data on case dismissals. While the numbers vary, generally speaking, DCJS numbers also show an increase in case dismissals post-reforms.
“The most significant problem with the statue is the remedy,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a recent panel discussion with the Center for Urban Future.
In that same interview, Bragg said he would be “pushing vigorously” various changes to the discovery laws.
Mayor Eric Adams said he too would be pushing lawmakers to make changes to the law this upcoming session.
“Many of these cases are dropped because of the reforms,” Adams said on Monday during his weekly “off topic” press conference. “I think the tweaks that [district attorneys] are asking for are not going to impact a person’s due process, it’s just giving [district attorneys] proper time.”
But members of the Alliance to Protect Kalief’s Law say district attorneys are misrepresenting the data to paint a negative picture of the reforms few of them even supported in the first place.
The coalition says that some of the data shows that discovery reform hasn’t had much of an impact on case dismissals. The number of dismissed indicted felony cases has remained relatively unchanged in the years the reforms have been in place when compared to the year before they took effect, OCA data shows.
“We're dealing in rhetoric that's really dangerous, rhetoric that attacks a very successful and common sense law,” Jack told the Eagle. “To the extent that there is some kind of issue that prosecutors are having getting the evidence, well, that lies squarely at the feet of the police.”
Last week, State Senator and mayoral candidate Zellnor Myrie announced his plan to introduce a bill that would give prosecutors direct access to police databases and electronic records from other agencies in an effort to help them get evidence from law enforcement quicker.
“This access will help alleviate delays, reduce the administrative burden on both prosecutors and law enforcement, and ensure that cases are resolved based on their merits rather than procedural failures,” the bill’s text reads. “By allowing staff in district attorneys' offices to directly retrieve records, the act also aims to return police officers to their core responsibilities of maintaining public safety. The legislature finds that these reforms will promote the timely and fair resolution of criminal cases, advancing the interests of justice for both defendants and the public at large.”
While the Legal Aid Society is in support of the legislation, Jack said she believes the justification behind the bill is flawed. Myrie and the bill’s Assembly sponsor, Assemblymember Micah Lasher, said in a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News said that they expect New York’s DAs to seek additional changes to the discovery law in 2025 and that lawmakers should give those proposals “serious consideration” “in light of the data.”
“We absolutely disagree with the framing that cases are being dismissed because of the discovery laws,” Jack said. “The data just doesn't bear that out.”
“We're five years into this now, and there's been just a lot of reticence in district attorneys’ offices to implement the culture change, quite honestly, that the discovery laws brought about,” she added.
Nearly each year after the passage of reforms, DAs have pushed lawmakers in Albany to scale them back.
The laws were first amended four months after they first took effect and then again in 2022. That year, lawmakers lessened the consequences for providing late additions to discovery as long as the filing was made in good faith. They also made a change to the laws that now allows defendants to file for pretrial release if an argument over discovery is prolonging a case.
