NY Discovery Laws Contributing to High Dismissal Rate of Domestic Abuse Cases

Reforms to New York’s discovery laws in 2019 created unforeseen issues, said officials.

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains on Nov. 19, 2024. Cara Ding/The Epoch Times

The 2019 changes to the state’s discovery law have contributed to a massive growth in domestic violence case dismissals and other case dismissals, according to an April 14 report by the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence.

Flaws with the current discovery law are leading to “incredibly high [case] dismissal rates that leave survivors without justice,” according to the report.

The report says that in New York City, 94 percent of domestic violence cases are dismissed. This is a 26 percent jump from 2019, when the reforms to the discovery law were put in place. Outside New York City, the state has a domestic violence dismissal rate of 49 percent.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch have been supporting a push to reform the discovery law in the state budget.

Hochul said the high dismissal rate negatively affects victims, as their perpetrators are set free without repercussions.

“No one understands the need for commonsense changes to our discovery laws better than victims of crime and our partners in law enforcement who see too many victims being denied justice and too many perpetrators reoffending thanks to loopholes in our laws,” Hochul said at a press conference on April 15.

According to a press release by Hochul’s office, 49,974 cases were dismissed for speedy trial violations in 2024, compared to 10,562 in 2019. Dismissals for felony cases more than doubled in Ulster County, from 3.6 percent to 8.2 percent between 2019 and 2023. Dismissal rates for misdemeanors in Ulster County doubled from 5.1 percent to 10.7 percent.

Tisch described the change in recidivism since the 2019 reforms at a press conference on April 1.

“If you compare 2018, the year before the reforms passed, to 2024, to last year, and you define recidivism as individuals who are committing three or more of the same crime in the same year, recidivism rates are up 146 percent for felony assault, 118 percent for auto theft, 83 percent for robbery, 64 percent for shoplifting, 71 percent for grand larceny and 61 percent for burglary. It’s a travesty,” she said.

The conservative Manhattan Institute think tank published a 2023 critique of the New York discovery laws reforms that found in 2019, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had 3,343 misdemeanor convictions for petit larceny. In 2021, the conviction number fell to 679.

The district attorney’s office recorded 1,646 misdemeanor convictions for unlicensed driving in 2019. In 2021, the convictions were down to 628. Traffic deaths rose 24 percent in that time.

According to the April 14 report, the state discovery law requires the prosecution to turn over evidence within a certain amount of time to ensure a speedy trial.

“If a mistake or omission is later found, even if the prosecutor acted in good faith and the missing evidence is duplicative or insignificant, the court often must retroactively count the time between when the prosecutor said they were ready and when the mistake was fixed against the prosecutor’s total timeline. If, as a result, the timeline has been exceeded—which is often the case, because of the retroactive addition of time—the case is dismissed,” stated the report.

“This means that a small, insignificant, or even duplicative piece of evidence can result in an entire case getting dismissed.”

Adams said at an April 1 press conference that “the reforms passed in Albany in 2019 have had unintended consequences and now it’s time to improve the law.”

The state report provided some examples of the discovery law reforms failing. In one case, charges were dropped against a man who physically assaulted a woman in front of their children after the prosecutor didn’t hand in an auto-generated document that had duplicative information that the prosecution thought was not discoverable.

Another domestic violence case against a man who punched a woman badly in the face was dropped due to the prosecution not handing over body-worn camera footage from an unsuccessful attempted home visit to the victim’s home. Discovery was judged incomplete.

The opposition against changes to the current discovery laws has been led by State Sen. Cordell Cleare, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and The Legal Aid Society. The budget missed its April 1 deadline due to battles in the legislature over discovery reform and proposed changes to involuntary commitment laws.

Cleare said she opposed changes to the discovery law because prosecutors could use discovery delays to pressure plea deals.

The Legal Aid Society said in a March 11 social media post that the changes to the discovery laws “would return us to an era marked by wrongful convictions, mass incarceration, coerced pleas, and court delays.” The organization implored the legislature to “allow the tens of millions of dollars allocated in recent years to fully take effect, including funding for technological improvements that local District Attorney offices have only just begun to implement.”

The Society suggested passing legislation allowing prosecutors to have easier access to NYPD records.

Heastie and Cleare did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.