Turns out Alvin Bragg is too tough on crime for the progressives running New York’s Legislature.
At the behest of the Manhattan district attorney and his Bronx and Brooklyn colleagues Darcel Clark and Eric Gonzalez, Gov. Kathy Hochul in this year’s budget talks sought three changes to the 2019 “discovery” law, which rewrote the rules for prosecutors sharing evidence with the defense.
The Legislature’s only giving her one of them.
The 2019 rules are slamming DA offices statewide: They require vastly more paperwork (much of it irrelevant), as prosecutors must turn over all evidence on a tight timeline, either 20 or 35 days after a perp is indicted.
As a result, DAs have to drop many more misdemeanor and even felony charges and also pre-emptively plea-bargain charges down.
Even so, cases get tossed because somebody failed to turn over an irrelevant log book.
And staff burnout is through the roof, with resignations soaring.
The three asks on discovery were beyond modest.
One that’s been deep-sixed is giving judges more discretion in deciding whether alleged discovery violations by prosecutors should result in a dismissal.
The other: Relaxing the rules so DAs need only turn over all relevant — rather than all related — evidence.
The one that reportedly survived puts defense lawyers on a 35-day clock to challenge a prosecutor’s compliance with evidence-sharing.
That’s a gesture at imposing deadlines on both sides — but the change lets judges extend the deadline for the defense.
Plus: Even a badly-overworked Legal Aid attorney can file such challenges as a matter of course. Higher-paid private lawyers (and gangs and other professional criminals can afford them) are sure to do so.
We’d hoped that Hochul’s discovery fixes held more promise than her modest ask on the no-bail law.
But this governor seems utterly unable to move the ball on crime.
Again: The Legislature’s Democratic majorities won’t heed even Bragg’s pleas to better protect the public.
Lawmakers are all but telling voters they’ll have to vote Republican to have any hope of turning crime around.
