Elizabeth Fisher (Neighborhood Defender Services) on discovery noncompliance and DA accountability
Fisher describes DAs blatantly disregarding discovery timelines, filing certificates of compliance without obtaining NYPD materials, and argues the only real solution is fewer cases through fewer arrests, calling on the council to pressure DAs to use their existing discretion.
I want to echo my colleagues'thanks to the committee for holding this hearing.
Some of the efforts that we have heard about today will reduce the amount of time that certain individuals spend on Rikers Island.
But I want to be clear, we are simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic without the district attorneys of this city here to take accountability for the decisions that they can make that could solve our case processing problems.
If the DAs keep requesting bail on too many New Yorkers, if they keep delaying providing discovery, if they keep delaying making plea offers that actually reflect the merits of the cases,
then no amount of procedural efficiency is ever going to allow us to close Rikers Island.
The only real solution to cases moving faster is to have fewer cases to move, fewer arrests, fewer arraignments, fewer people cycling through a system that never should have touched them.
And only then can our offices direct our limited resources toward the cases where legal system involvement is genuinely warranted and move those cases swiftly.
I want to turn directly to discovery because there was a lot of discussion about efforts to comply with the discovery law in the testimony today.
But I want to talk about what is actually happening in our courtrooms and in our cases.
The more this state legislature chips away at the defense's right to full and speedy discovery, the slower prosecutors become about providing it.
It is not too onerous.
That is not the issue.
The law is not too onerous on the prosecution because when they fear the consequences of not providing discovery in a timely manner, we see that they do provide it.
We have cases in Manhattan where DAs are saying on the record that they are refusing to turn over surveillance video that they have
three or four months into a case, despite the statutory requirements.
There is a blatant disregard for the timelines in the statute.
We are also seeing DAs file certificates compliance while simultaneously acknowledging that they haven't obtained materials central to the case from the NYPD.
I myself have handled a case recently where the prosecutor filed a certificate of compliance while failing to turn over the lead detective's entire enterprise case management system file that the NYPD testified about earlier.
Their explanation was that despite due diligence, they had been unable to obtain that case file.
The detective in that case happened to be a member of a task force embedded within the DA's office.
If what the NYPD representative here today was saying is true about the automatic access
that the DAs have to these files, then why are we not receiving them five, six months sometimes into a case?
The DA's often inability to obtain
Discovery from the NYPD cannot be the reason for delaying a case.
They could solve this problem tomorrow by simply giving the DAs access to the NYPD files.
They simply refuse to do so, and that refusal is having a human cost.
Cases are stalling, people are waiting, and Rikers is staying full.
Now, I want to go back to the fundamental problem of volume.
Despite a steady decrease in major crimes, arrests are up from pre-pandemic levels, and more people are entering the system at every point.
But prosecutions are also up, and that matters just as much.
Arraignments in our office have risen steadily since 2023.
By 2025, we were handling 15% more cases than two years prior.
And while our numbers this year are approximately the same as they were in 2023, we are facing unprecedented levels of attrition in our office due to underfunding and high caseloads.
In June and July,
I am losing five experienced felony attorneys.
And that might not seem like a lot, but I have an office of 30 attorneys handling caseloads.
In two months, I'm losing one-sixth of my attorney staff.
People working at our offices can no longer afford
to work and have families in this city at the pay that we are able to give them.
And that does affect our ability to handle cases.
The district attorneys have the ability to address this volume problem.
And the city council has the ability to demand better of them.
None of this, none of the choices that they have the ability to make requires money.
None of it requires new legislation.
It doesn't require new ideas.
It requires them to just make different choices.
They have the tools.
They have the discretion.
What they have lacked is sufficient pressure to use those tools and use that discretion.
And we are asking you to use what is within your power to apply.
That pressure.