Debate over discovery continues in Albany
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Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas testified during a budget hearing held jointly by the State Senate and State Assembly on Thursday, Feb. 13, 2025. Debate over the state’s discovery reform laws dominated the hearing, which also featured testimony from district attorneys and public defenders. Screenshot via NYS Senate
By Jacob Kaye
Debate over New York’s evidence-sharing laws dominated a budget hearing on the state’s criminal and civil legal system held by the state legislature last week.
New York’s second-ranking judge, district attorneys, public defenders, law enforcement and advocates pleaded their positions on the state’s discovery reforms, which have been in place for nearly half a decade, before a joint hearing held by the Assembly and State Senate.
The debate, which will likely only heat up over the coming weeks and months, was first sparked by Governor Kathy Hochul, who proposed making a series of changes to the 2019 reforms in her executive budget proposal in January. While conversations about the current laws and Hochul’s proposed changes have mostly taken place behind closed doors, Thursday’s hearing appeared to mark a new stage in the fight over the increasingly controversial reforms.
At the center of the discussion about New York’s discovery laws was Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas, who oversees the management of the state’s court system.
Zayas, who for years served as the top criminal court judge in Queens, didn’t take a firm position on the governor’s proposal, and both defended and critiqued the way the reforms were written and are playing out in courtrooms across New York.
While he described the relatively new laws as “daunting” to both prosecutors and defense attorneys, he also expressed the court system’s “full-throated support” for the reforms passed alongside a series of changes to New York’s bail laws in 2019.
“The court system obviously is over the top supportive of discovery reform that continues to meaningfully incentivize the early and full production of discovery by the prosecution,” Zayas said. “But I do think that the discovery statute is extraordinarily daunting because of how many categories of documents that have to be turned over and the voluminous nature of it.”
While district attorneys across the state have claimed that their inability to turn over the significant amount of evidence on time has led to a high rate of cases being dismissed based on speedy trial violations, public defenders have said that the situation described by the DAs hasn’t played out in the data.
Zayas argued on Thursday that the reality was somewhere in the middle.
While courts in New York City have seen major increases in dismissals in a handful of case types over the past four years, the dismissal rate for indicted felonies, which account for the most serious crimes, have remained virtually unchanged.
The chief administrative judge suggested that the discrepancy exists because prosecutors are likely to put more attention on an indicted felony case than they are on misdemeanor cases.
“The fact that something is getting indicted tells me that prosecutors see that as a really serious case that they want to prosecute with robustness,” he said. “They are complying with their discovery because that is their really important case.”
While Zayas was asked about discovery reform over a half dozen times by lawmakers on Thursday, he wasn’t asked specifically about the changes to the laws proposed by Hochul last month.
The governor first suggested she was considering revising the laws during her State of the State address in mid-January.
“I'll fight to finally close those loopholes that were created in our discovery laws that delay trials and lead to cases being thrown out on minor technicalities,” Hochul said at the time.
And while she initially said she’d propose a handful of tweaks to the laws, the proposal included in her executive budget was far more sweeping.
Under Hochul’s proposal, prosecutors would only have an obligation to turn over evidence they decide to be relevant in the case. The legislation would make a handful of other changes to the reforms, including a provision for the automatic redaction of sensitive information in discovery documents, including a witness’ address and personal data unrelated to the case. As it currently stands, getting permission to redact information in discovery documents can sometimes turn into a lengthy litigation process.
The governor also said she wants to change the required amount of time before prosecutors can present a defendant’s statements to a grand jury. Currently, prosecutors need to provide a 48-hour notice before the presentation of a defendant’s statements to a grand jury. Hochul wants to cut the notice time down to 24 hours.
District attorneys have universally celebrated the changes, which they claim retain the heart of the reforms but would address the increases in case dismissals.
“[The District Attorneys Association of the State of New York] supports changes to our discovery law that would help fulfill the original intent of discovery reform, to allow for early, broad disclosure to criminal defendants, so that they have all the information that they need to defend themselves, while at the same time helping to eliminate the gamesmanship and the technical dismissals that have been burdening the criminal justice system,” Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon, who serves as president of the DAASNY, testified on Thursday.
Public defender organizations and criminal justice advocates have been far more critical of the changes, which they say will effectively revert New York to its pre-reform days, which often saw prosecutors wait until the eve of a trial to share the evidence they had against a defendant.
“We cannot go back to the decades upon decades of New Yorkers being forced into the impossible position to take pleas with no timely access to full and transparent evidence,” the Legal Aid Society said in written testimony submitted to the legislature.
“Although the governor has characterized her proposal as a set of ‘tweaks’ to ‘close loopholes’ and ‘streamline’ the discovery process, the changes in the proposal would actually change the scope of the evidence required to be disclosed, not just the process by which it is disclosed,” they added. “Further, the changes to the process are so severe that they remove the incentive for prosecutors to follow the law by dramatically weakening the statute’s enforcement mechanism. It makes the statute into more of a set of guidelines rather than an enforceable law.”
Groups including the Center for Community Alternatives, the Chief Defenders Association of New York, the Innocence Project, the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the New York State Defenders Association and Family and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted all testified in opposition to Hochul’s proposed discovery changes on Thursday.
While the debate over discovery was discussed publicly during the hearing, negotiations over the laws are likely to again retreat behind closed doors as lawmakers and the governor begin to hash out the state’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget.
The budget is due April 1.
