Gov. Kathy Hochul took a break from negotiations over the state’s overdue budget to join local law enforcement leaders in Kingston as part of her effort to pass changes to a 2020 law that critics say has led to a major increase in dismissals in criminal cases. At a press conference Tuesday at the Ulster County Law Enforcement Center, Hochul said the proposed changes to the state’s discovery law would prevent dismissals based on honest mistakes or gamesmanship by defense attorneys while maintaining fairness and transparency for defendants.

“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 re-offending thanks to loopholes in our laws,” said Hochul. “I made a promise to New Yorkers that their family would be my fight — that means standing strong to pass a State Budget that makes New York safer and more affordable for all.”

Discovery reform passed the state legislature and was signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019 and went into effect in 2020. The law significantly expanded the amount of material prosecutors must turn over to the defense ahead of trial while compressing the timeline. Proponents of the law say that the reforms help prevent situations where prosecutors wait until the eve of trial to unveil witnesses and other evidence, leaving defense attorneys with little time to prepare to counter them. The law is named for Kalief Browder, a New York City man who was held in pre-trial detention on Rikers Island for three years over the theft of a backpack and later committed suicide.

Critics of the new law say that it has led to a sharp increase in dismissals based on a defendant’s right to a speedy trial, including in cases involving domestic violence and other serious crimes. Hochul said that in the four years since the discovery reforms took effect, dismissals on speedy trial grounds rose a staggering 373 percent from 10,562 in 2019 to 49,974 last year. In Ulster County, dismissals in felony cases rose from 3.6 percent in 2019 to 8.2 percent in 2023. Dismissal rates in local misdemeanor cases, meanwhile, more than doubled from 5.1 percent to 10.7 percent during the same period.

One of those dismissals included a murder case against purported gang member Raymond Snyder for the July 2020 murder of Romero Underwood in a drug-related home invasion robbery. In April 2022, the case against Snyder collapsed after County Court Judge Bryan Rounds tossed out virtually all of the evidence in the case — including Snyder’s blood at the crime scene, in a getaway vehicle and on the murder weapon — based on discovery violations. The Ulster County District Attorney’s Office appealed the ruling and last year secured a conviction in the case. Snyder is currently serving 25 years to life in state prison.

Speaking with Kingston Wire, Ulster County District Attorney Emmanuel Nneji, who joined Hochul, Ulster County Sheriff Juan Figueroa and other officials at the event, called the Snyder case a prime example of the issues with discovery reform.

“The law as it is written caused chaos in this community,” said Nneji. “These gamesmanship opportunities need to be cut out because they don’t help the system, they don’t help victims and they don’t help defendants.”

At the press conference on Tuesday, Hochul detailed other examples of cases dismissed over minor or inadvertent discovery violations, including an attempted murder case that collapsed because prosecutors overlooked a single snippet of body-cam video that showed the teenage victim being wheeled out by paramedics. In another case, Hochul said, a serial drunk driver went free because prosecutors failed to disclose that six years earlier, one of the arresting officers had been disciplined for inadvertently hitting a garbage can with his patrol vehicle.

“I'm not making this up; because the prosecutors didn't think to disclose this irrelevant detail, that drunk driver is back driving on our roads,” Hochul said. “We don't want this anymore. We don't want this. Unrepentant criminals making a mockery of our justice system.”

The changes sought by Hochul include ones that she said would remove an incentive for defense attorneys’ delaying challenging discovery issues until the last minute in an effort to derail the prosecution’s timeline and win a dismissal. Other changes would make it easier to redact information like witnesses’ physical addresses and personal data unrelated to the case and make it harder to dismiss cases based on good-faith mistakes by prosecutors in the discovery process.

“My intent is to uphold the original premise behind the reforms back in 2019,” said Hochul. “But we also want to prevent entire cases from being dismissed if a discovery error is not harmful to the defense.”

Hochul’s push to reform the discovery law has led to a standoff in Albany that has stretched more than two weeks after the state’s April 1 budget deadline. The controversy over discovery reform mirrors similar arguments over efforts to make changes to another 2019 law that eliminated cash bail for nearly all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies and 2021 legislation that banned the use of long-term solitary confinement in New York jails and prisons.

Progressive Democrats in the state Assembly and Senate have steadfastly refused to back any changes in the reform legislation calling them an effort to roll back badly needed reforms and return to the era of mass incarceration. In a statement issued in response to Hochul’s visit, Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha called the governor’s holdup of the state budget over discovery reform misplaced given the impact on the Trump administration’s agenda on federal aid, immigration and free speech.

“We legislators have heard on this matter from all sides, and there has yet to be a single compelling argument for why we need to undo the law through this budget process, or where there’s any evidence that the historically higher rate of dismissal in domestic violence cases is related to the discovery law,” said Shrestha. “The governor’s time would be better spent remaining in Albany to wrap up negotiations and pass a budget that funds the services New Yorkers need and addresses the affordability crisis.”