Hochuls no-brainer fixes make NYs radical discovery law a little less insane

State legislators have the opportunity this week to make the Empire State more stable — and a place of greater civic trust — by finalizing Albany’s delayed budget deal with all of Gov.Hochul’s proposed amendments to the 2019 discovery law intact.This would edge New York back from being a radical outlier among the 50 states when it comes to prosecutorial policy.And, critically, it would help restore basic rule of law: the very foundation of a thriving society.When New York’s discovery law was enacted in 2019, advocates argued that stronger guidelines would ensure that defendants know the weight of the evidence against them.But New York lawmakers did something insane.

They created a statute that hobbles the functioning of the criminal-justice system and called it “progress.”Unlike any other state in the union, New York now requires a long laundry list of specific types of records prosecutors must gather, plus anything else remotely “related” to a case.What about material that is related — but purely irrelevant (like surveillance footage shot with the lens cap on)? Prosecutors now must collect that, too!Do other states require this amount of grunt work in order to prosecute cases? No — none even come close.In fact, many states — including California, Maine and Oregon — only require prosecutors to collect a handful of specific evidence categories in order to move a case forward.That’s it!Still other states — like Washington, Pennsylvania and Illinois — only require prosecutors to additionally assemble more if defense attorneys show there are missing records that are pertinent to the case.Again, New York is the only state where, when prosecutors fail to collect “evidence” that all sides agree is totally useless, the case cannot proceed.But that’s not even the most extreme part about New York’s law: Unlike all other states, New York penalizes prosecutors who haven’t done the impossible — that is, collected every scrap of irrel...