Professor Martin J. LaFalce, director of the in-house Defense and Advocacy Clinic at St. John’s Law, worked with several other law professors to draft a letter (PDF) opposing Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed rollbacks to New York’s landmark 2020 criminal discovery reforms.

The letter conveys that New York’s pre-2020 discovery and speedy trial statutes suffered from grave deficiencies. Because their disclosure obligations weren’t tied to speedy trial rules, prosecutors could withhold evidence until the eve of trial, if they shared basic evidence at all. New Yorkers could not make informed decisions about their cases, investigate adequately, weigh plea offers, secure exculpatory evidence, or meaningfully prepare for trial before the last minute.

The 2020 criminal discovery law, by contrast, ties a prosecutor’s disclosure obligations to their speedy trial clock and empowers courts to assess whether a prosecutor’s efforts to provide discovery were reasonable. Where a court finds that a prosecutor has acted reasonably, the speedy trial clock remains unaffected, even if the prosecutor has not provided all evidence to the accused. That standard has created a common-sense judicial check on prosecutorial power and incentivized prosecutors to make timely disclosures and assess their evidence before the eleventh hour.

Professor LaFalce and his co-writers assert that the Governor’s proposal would abolish this essential accountability measure, stating:

As scholars who teach, study, and practice the law, we train students to be ethical lawyers for the public interest, and we document how systems can deny people human dignity, entrench racial inequality, and drive convictions in cases where people are factually innocent. Those concerns motivate our opposition to Governor Hochul’s proposal, which would gut New York’s 2020 discovery statute in its relative infancy, reverse the progress New York has made towards transparency, and return to an era where guilty pleas were secured by coercion, not evidence.

Law.com interviewed Professor LaFalce for a story about the letter (subscription required). He also spoke to other news outlets, including the Daily News (subscription required), about the letter and wider efforts to oppose the proposed discovery reform rollbacks.