New York criminal defense attorney James Magee, a Democrat, has seen firsthand how bail reform hurt the weak and vulnerable that his party vows to protect.
When his district’s state assemblywoman, Catherine Nolan, a Democrat, announced her retirement in February, opening her seat up for the first time in more than three decades, Magee jumped into the race.
“A refusal to prosecute crime cannot be a part of this party’s platform. I am running to reverse this trend and show that the Democratic Party can govern sensibly on public safety,” he told The Epoch Times.
Magee was raised by a working-class family in Sunnyside, a neighborhood on the west side of Queens borough in New York.
After graduating from law school in 2006, he worked as an assistant district attorney at the city’s Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office for five years before opening his criminal defense practice.
During his years working in the New York criminal justice system, he saw how the system evolved from a heavy-handed punitive approach to one that embraces treatment and rehabilitation.
Yet, changes to the bail system just blew that up, he said.
In April 2019, five months after Democrats regained control of both legislative chambers and the governorship in New York, they crammed major criminal justice changes into the annual state budget.
The overhaul is often called bail reform because it eliminates cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. For those offenses, defendants are to be released without paying any money.
It also made big changes to the state’s discovery law, requiring that prosecutors automatically turn over a large amount of evidence to defense counsel a lot faster. If prosecutors fail to honor the timeline, they risk having their cases dismissed by judges.
“I was shocked when the bail reform was passed,“ Magee said. ”It was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
“If you must fix the criminal justice system, you should have fixed the archaic laws and punishments in the penal code itself, not the bail system or the discovery statutes.”
Even before the changes, bail was rarely set in misdemeanor cases that he handled, except where the suspects had a history of missing court dates. For these people, nine out of 10 had either mental illness or drug addiction. So a cash bail helped incentivize them to come back to court and get court-ordered treatment, he said.
As to the new discovery law, it became so burdensome for prosecutors to catch up with all the paperwork that many started to stop prosecuting misdemeanor cases altogether; others simply quit under the pressure, according to Magee.
“Prosecutors are racing against the clock just to keep the cases alive. They must focus on rapes, guns, shootings, and they just have no time to prosecute petty crime anymore,” he said.
That means many of Magee’s clients are falling through the cracks. A big chunk of his business is misdemeanor cases, for which mental illness and drug addictions are big drivers. About half of his clients are low-income minorities.
Prior to the reform, he placed two or three clients into court-ordered treatment programs every month. During the past two-and-a-half years, he has placed none.
“For many of them, criminal prosecution is often the only incentive to get treatment,“ Magee said. ”Plus, New York has a lot of leeways to behave whatever way you want, and a lot of people with mental illness had no access to treatment until they were caught with a petty crime.
“When that happens, it is a good opportunity for us to treat them, but all that is blown up now because their cases are not being prosecuted anymore.”
The law hurt not only his clients, but also victims.
“Petty crimes are no longer prosecuted, and people suffering from mental health issues and addictions are on the street—that is why you are seeing an uptick in crime,“ he said. ”And the victims of petty crime are often small business owners and residents who don’t have a lot of money to begin with.”
When Nolan, the three-decade incumbent in Assembly District 37, announced her retirement, Magee and three other Democratic candidates jumped into the open primary. The primary election is set for June 28.
Crime is a major issue in the race. Two candidates, Juan Ardila and Johanna Carmona, propose more restrictive gun laws to curb violent crime; another candidate, Brent O’Leary, suggests tweaking the bail reform and stemming illegal gun trafficking.
Magee is the only candidate running to systematically fix bail reform.
He’s been knocking on doors every day, talking to residents in the district. They have complained to him about the graffiti in the park, drug dealing around the corner, thefts of Amazon packages, and occasional shootings in the neighborhoods.
Magee tried to convince them of the link between bail reform and rising crime.
“There are people now in my party who believe that in modern society, we do not need a criminal justice system. We should move toward a Utopia society,” he said. “I think while we should never stop addressing the root causes of crime, it is also a basic governmental responsibility to address crime once it is committed.”
