Dismissed Queens criminal case highlights discovery debate

The Queens Supreme Court dismissed a case against four individuals facing illegal weapon possession charges because the district attorneys did not meet their discovery obligations. The Appellate Division recently upheld the lower court ruling. Eagle file photo by Walter Karling

By Noah Powelson

As negotiations over changes to the state’s evidence-sharing laws hold up the passage of the state’s budget in Albany, a recent criminal case in Queens appears to highlight the core of the debate over discovery.

Last week, the Appellate Division, Second Department ruled in favor of four individuals who had the weapons charges against them dropped after the Queens district attorney’s office failed to turn over all the evidence they had against the defendants in the case.

The court ruled in People v. Coley that when the Queens district attorney’s office declared they were ready for trial, they had failed to disclose several required pieces of evidence related to the relevant disciplinary history of one of the arresting officers. As a result, a Queens judge found the district attorney had violated the defendants’ right to a speedy trial and the case was dismissed. The Appellate Division upheld the ruling last week.

The dismissal is a direct result of the state’s 2019 discovery reforms, which, among other things, require prosecutors to submit all evidence within a certain time period and enforces penalties, like speedy trial dismissals, if those deadlines are not met. Prior to the reforms, defense attorneys said district attorneys across the state would sometimes wait until the eve of a trial to send evidence over, leaving defendants at a major disadvantage. Under current law, prosecutors are required to hand over “all items and information that relate to the subject matter of the case” within 180 days of the arraignment of a felony charge.

The requirement, district attorneys have argued, expanded the scope of evidence too broadly and put an unreasonable burden on prosecutors to prepare evidence on time.

Governor Kathy Hochul responded to their concerns by attempting to work a series of changes to the landmark reforms into the state’s budget, which, as of Friday, was 11 days past due.

Though the specifics of the changes to discovery law are currently being negotiated, Hochul initially proposed a series of alterations to the law that public defense organizations and criminal justice advocates claimed would amount to an effective return to the time before the reforms passed.

Hochul initially proposed changing the language of the state’s discovery law to only require prosecutors to turn over evidence that is “relevant” to a case, as opposed to evidence that “relates” to a case. The change, the governor argued, would give judges more discretion in choosing which cases to dismiss, and prevent thousands of cases from being dropped over technicalities.

In 2019, around 2,570 cases in New York were dismissed by judges for speedy trial violations, according to Office of Court Administration data. That number jumped to 3,889 in 2023, the most recent year data is available.

But while Hochul and prosecutors have said the dismissals are often caused by technicalities, public defense groups and advocates have pointed the finger at DAs’ offices, claiming it's often the case that dismissals are caused by prosecutors failing to turn over evidence in good faith.

While it’s not entirely clear what the reason is behind the spike in dismissals – a vast majority of judicial decisions are not published – the recent dismissal in People v. Coley appears to get at the heart of the dispute.

In April 2022, NYPD lieutenant Ramiro Ruiz responded to a call of men fighting in Queens. Ruiz and several other officers arrived at the scene and found four individuals having an argument inside a car. When one of the individuals got out of the car, Ruiz allegedly saw a loaded pistol below the driver seat and arrested the four on illegal possession of a weapon charges.

Four months later, the district attorney filed what’s known as a “certificate of completion” in August, indicating they had met their discovery obligation and that they were ready for trial.

But defense attorneys in the case said several key pieces of information were missing, including detailed documents regarding several civil lawsuits, civilian complaints and Internal Affairs Bureau charges that Ruiz was the subject of.

The district attorney submitted several more COCs over the next few months, slowly adding more information about Ruiz’s history each time.

Eventually, the DA revealed that Ruiz had previously been found to not be a credible witness.

In 2016, Ruiz had pulled over a driver for an alleged traffic violation. Ruiz later testified that during his interaction with the driver, he allegedly saw a single credit card with a burn mark on the car’s dashboard and a stack of 15 other credit cards before he arrested the driver and passenger. Ruiz also said during the trial he could “read the defendant’s name on the card,” and “[h]e could also see that the fourth-to-last digit on the credit card number appeared to have been altered from a numeral ‘one’ to a numeral ‘four’” while he stood outside the vehicle.

The Appellate Division, Second Department at the time ruled Ruiz’s testimony conflicted with the testimony given by the other officers on the scene. They also ruled Ruiz’s claim that he could read the name and numbers on the card from a far distance without any sort of training was “‘implausible and contrived,’” and ruled his testimony incredible.

This information about Ruiz was not given by the district attorneys until the defense and the judge made repeated requests. The Queens Supreme Court judge in the case eventually found all of the prosecution's COCs invalid, and the indictment of the four individuals was dismissed.

On appeal, the district attorney argued they had exercised their due diligence in handing over all evidence to the defense, including letters summarizing the police officer’s misconduct. They additionally argued the officers’ disciplinary history was not related to the current case, and they did not possess transcripts of the allegedly unrelated court proceedings.

The core issue of this case, as the appellate court pointed out, is what information qualifies as “related” to the case.

The district attorney argued that a court case that occurred years before People v. Coley was not related to the case at hand, and they therefore did not have to disclose testimony for the previous case. The defense attorney argued that since Ruiz’s credibility as a witness was questioned in that previous case, and evidence related to witnesses must be turned over, they were required to disclose the testimony.

“This case hinges upon whether the Supreme Court correctly determined that the People had failed to satisfy their discovery obligations,” the appellate court decision reads. “Based upon the plain meaning of the text… we therefore hold that records that may ‘tend to impeach the credibility of a testifying prosecution witness’ are related to the subject matter of the case, and must be disclosed.”

Notably, the court also wrote that their reading of the law matches the intent of the legislature to broaden the scope of required evidence.

“The legislature could have, but chose not to, include language… limiting discovery of impeachment evidence to materials related to the facts underlying the charges against the defendant,” the decision reads.

When asked for comment on the case, a spokesperson for the Queens district attorney’s office said they were in the “process of reviewing the decision.”

While those who support tweaking the language of discovery reform may say this case is another example of an alleged criminal with an illegal weapon walking free because of a technicality, public defenders and legal advocates say this is the law working as intended.

“The 2nd Department's recent decision, People v. Coley, is based on a due diligence standard, which is an objective way for courts to ensure that prosecutors are doing their jobs,” Yung-Mi Lee, the director of Law and Appeals at Brooklyn Defender Services’ Criminal Defense Practice, told the Eagle in a statement. “There is no flaw or loophole in the law that allowed for this dismissal. This case was not dismissed based on a ‘technicality.’”

Brooklyn Defender Services are a part of a coalition of public defense groups who say district attorneys are misrepresenting the data of dismissed cases to paint a negative picture of the reforms.

“When the court has to determine whether a police officer has violated a person's constitutional rights, in this case, the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the police officer's credibility is pivotal,” Lee said. “Prior acts of misconduct and prior findings of incredibility are crucial when courts have to make these constitutional determinations. Evidence about credibility, in and of itself, amounts to constitutional importance.”

Other legal advocates say current discovery law prevents prosecutors from hiding information from the defendants, and People V. Coley is an example of that.

“A judge took the rarest of steps, finding an officer untrustworthy when assessing whether he had violated someone’s constitutional rights,” Oren Oded, the executive director of the government watchdog group Scrutinize, told the Eagle in a statement. “That finding was disclosed only because discovery reform required it — and even then, the prosecutor withheld it until a judge intervened. Without the discovery reform law, that evidence would have stayed buried.”

Debate over the discovery reform rollback has made slow progress in Albany as lawmakers and district attorneys continue to negotiate over the language of the changes. On Thursday, New York State Senator Cordell Cleare introduced a bill that would codify the recent People v. Bay decision into law. The decision found that a judge does not have to automatically dismiss a case due to a discovery mistake as long as prosecutors exhibited due diligence and good faith.

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz was one of six state district attorneys who voiced their support of Hochul’s discovery rollbacks in Albany this week. During a press conference, Katz said she might accept the codification of language used in the recent People v. Bay decision as long as judges would also be able to determine whether or not the evidence is relevant to the case.