There is a principle in our criminal justice system that should not be controversial:
If the government accuses you of a crime, you have a right to know the evidence against you.
Period.
Prosecutors should disclose evidence. Defendants should have meaningful access to information necessary to prepare a defense. Exculpatory evidence should never be hidden. Due process isn’t some technical inconvenience standing in the way of a conviction. It is one of the foundations of the American justice system.
But there is another principle that ought to be equally obvious:
A criminal case should ultimately rise or fall on the facts—not on whether somebody failed to upload the right document into the right computer system before the clock ran out.
And therein lies the story of New York’s discovery reforms.
In 2019, Albany replaced the state’s old discovery rules with Criminal Procedure Law Article 245, dramatically expanding the material prosecutors were required to collect and automatically provide to defendants. The new system took effect in January 2020 and tied discovery compliance closely to New York’s speedy-trial requirements. (NYSenate.gov)
The goal was understandable: end what critics called “trial by ambush” and give defendants earlier and broader access to the evidence against them.
The question is what happened when a legitimate reform collided with the reality of running a criminal justice system.
A 2023 Manhattan Institute report by Hannah Meyers painted a troubling picture. It argued that Article 245 had created enormous administrative burdens for prosecutors and police departments and contributed to cases being dismissed for procedural reasons rather than being resolved on their merits. The report cited data showing that, in the early years following implementation, discovery deadlines were being met in only a fraction of cases and that dismissal rates had increased substantially. (Manhattan Institute)
The report also described something anyone who has worked inside a bureaucracy should recognize immediately.
Paperwork produces more paperwork.
Body-camera footage. Police reports. Laboratory records. Witness information. Electronic communications. Personnel records. Photographs. Video. Documents sitting with another agency that the prosecutor may not even control.
One arrest can generate an extraordinary digital trail.
And under Article 245, prosecutors weren’t simply trying cases anymore. They were also responsible for locating, collecting, reviewing, redacting, tracking and transmitting enormous amounts of information—sometimes information of marginal importance to the actual question before the court. (Manhattan Institute)
This wasn’t merely a New York City issue.
Smaller counties can face a different version of the same problem. They may have multiple town and village police departments, sheriff’s offices, State Police, laboratories and other agencies feeding information into cases—without Manhattan-sized staffs or technology budgets.
That matters here in the Hudson Valley.
And by 2025, something significant happened.
Albany effectively acknowledged that the discovery system needed adjustment.
Governor Kathy Hochul, who described the original reforms as having made important improvements in fairness, proposed changes because of what her administration characterized as unintended consequences. Her administration argued that relatively minor discovery errors could interact with the speedy-trial clock and result in cases being dismissed without consideration of the underlying merits. (Governor Kathy Hochul)
This wasn’t simply rhetoric from critics of the 2019 law.
The Legislature changed it.
As part of the FY 2026 state budget, New York amended Article 245. Those changes took effect August 7, 2025. Among other things, the revised law narrowed some disclosure obligations, gave courts greater ability to consider prosecutors’ overall compliance efforts and whether missing material actually prejudiced the defense, and changed procedures surrounding challenges to discovery compliance. (Governor Kathy Hochul)
The state also committed $135 million for prosecutors and defense attorneys to help meet discovery obligations. (Governor Kathy Hochul)
Think about what that tells us.
A reform enacted to fix the criminal justice system subsequently required another reform—and another substantial infusion of taxpayer money—to address problems created by the first one.
Here in the Hudson Valley, the debate wasn’t theoretical.
When Hochul came to the region in April 2025 to argue for changes, her administration reported that Ulster County’s felony dismissal rate had risen from 3.6 percent in 2019 to 8.2 percent in 2023, while misdemeanor dismissals increased from 5.1 percent to 10.7 percent. Statewide, the administration said speedy-trial dismissals increased from 10,562 in 2019 to 49,974 in 2024. Those figures were presented by the governor’s office as evidence supporting amendments to the law. (Governor Kathy Hochul)
Those numbers deserve scrutiny, including the obvious caution that an increase following a law does not, by itself, prove that every additional dismissal was caused solely by that law.
That’s important.
Criminal justice policy is too serious for convenient statistics from either side.
Defense advocates had legitimate reasons for demanding discovery reform in the first place. A defendant cannot intelligently decide whether to plead guilty, challenge evidence or proceed to trial while being kept in the dark about the prosecution’s case.
That isn’t being “soft on crime.”
That’s the Constitution doing its job.
But protecting defendants and maintaining a functioning criminal justice system aren’t mutually exclusive goals.
Justice isn’t supposed to be a choice between protecting the accused and protecting the public.
It has to do both.
The Manhattan Institute’s 2023 report should therefore be read today not simply as an indictment of Article 245, but as an early warning about something Albany eventually decided required legislative attention.
And this is where the story becomes bigger than discovery.
Albany has a habit of passing sweeping reforms and announcing the intention as though the intention itself were the accomplishment.
It isn’t.
Government has an obligation to ask what happens next.
Can the district attorney actually comply?
Can the small-town police department provide everything required on time?
Can public defenders realistically review the mountain of material they’re receiving?
Are victims being heard?
Are defendants getting genuinely useful information—or merely gigabytes of it?
Are judges resolving cases according to their merits?
And when the law doesn’t work as intended, is Albany willing to admit it and fix it?
In this instance, New York eventually did change course. The 2025 amendments are now part of the experiment, and they deserve to be judged by evidence rather than political talking points. The relevant questions are measurable: Are fewer cases being dismissed solely because of nonprejudicial discovery errors? Are defendants still receiving evidence early enough to mount an effective defense? Are prosecutors and public defenders spending less time fighting over compliance and more time litigating the actual case?
That’s accountability.
Not whether the legislation had a noble title.
Not whether one political party gets credit.
Not whether prosecutors, defense attorneys or advocates win the day’s press conference.
Does the system produce justice?
Because somewhere behind every criminal case there may be a victim waiting for an answer.
There may also be a defendant whose liberty is at stake and who deserves every protection the Constitution provides.
Those aren’t competing inconveniences.
They’re the reason the justice system exists.
Albany’s challenge is building a system capable of protecting both.
And perhaps the biggest lesson from New York’s discovery experiment is remarkably simple:
Good intentions can write a law. Only results can tell us whether it works.
