Chair Brooks-Powers questions public defenders on discovery funding and data management system status

Since the discovery reforms were passed seven years ago, your offices have received tens of millions of dollars for implementation needs.

Can you describe how you've spent your share of this money and what is the status of purchasing, installing, and fully implementing use of discovery data management systems?

Sure, I'll start and my colleagues might have additional information.

First and foremost, let's recognize that the discovery, initial discovery changes in the law went into effect a month before COVID hit and then Governor Cuomo suspended all criminal

procedure law statewide for over a year and a half.

During that time, however, we kept pressuring the city, the state, and the district attorneys saying, we need to be prepared.

You're not sending us discovery during the pendency of these cases.

At some point, the courts are going to open up.

At some point, we are going to need to have electronic flow of discovery.

We didn't get the millions of dollars you're talking about until three years later.

By that time, the backlog had already been set.

And still to today, we have homicide.

cases and other serious cases that still have to be tried based on that backlog.

That said, you heard Mach J testify when you asked this question about the technology that each of our offices had to figure out how to stand up

brand new systems, just to set sort of a level set here.

Before COVID, the entire city of New York's court system operated on paper only, really.

We never had electronic filing.

We did during COVID.

They have now removed that, and we're back to paper in many ways.

New York State, particularly a city like New York, was far behind the rest of the nation, and we still are.

So where are we right now?

We still don't have a good vendor to provide electronic discovery monitoring systems.

It was referenced earlier today.

Each of us engaged, many of us engaged in our offices with that company, and it has been a problem.

That said, we also have been suggesting to the city and state that this shouldn't be an individual office's responsibility.

Right?

We could have.

New York City has an enormous IT investment.

that looks at systems all the time, and yet there's nobody building out an infrastructure that would allow us to simply not have to conduct

one-on-one contract negotiations with vendors.

There was a systemic way to do this.

The city and the state failed to do it.

So now we're picking up the pieces.

What have we done at Legal Aid Society?

In lieu of that, we've hired litigation assistants.

So we utilized our money to bring in a brand new role at Legal Aid Society of people who are

trained specifically on categorizing, analyzing, reviewing, and helping attorneys prep for hearing and trial.

Problem is, our budgets have been flat.

I now have those same folks going to law school, which is a really great success story for those folks.

But I know my budget is tight and I can't rehire them right now without additional funds.

So I'm going to be behind the eight ball again.

And that's just one example.

Each of us have had to sort of go out on its own to try to figure this out.

But it has not been easy.

I'm just going to ask if everyone could be really tight with their responses because we do have a couple more panels after this.