Defendants Kept in the Dark About Evidence, Until It’s Too Late<br />This year, the New York State Bar Association for the first time is throwing its weight behind a new Assembly bill requiring prosecutors to automatically turn over police reports, witness names<br />and statements, and grand jury testimony early in a case.<br />New York is one of 10 states where prosecutors can wait until just before trial to turn over witness names<br />and statements and other key evidence known as discovery, which backs up criminal charges.<br />If the law changes, “we’re going to see a huge increase in crime because no one’s going to cooperate,” said Scott McNamara, the district attorney of Oneida County<br />and the president-elect of the state district attorneys association, which has opposed changes to New York’s discovery rules.<br />He leads Discovery for Justice, a Bronx group founded in 2013 to oppose the discovery rules that some critics deride as New York’s “blindfold law.”<br />“When I was a cop, I always believed the criminal justice system was on the level,” said Mr. Berkley, who was a critic of some departmental practices<br />and who has four brothers who have served time in prison.<br />A New York State Bar Association report concluded that states with more open<br />systems did not have worse problems with witness intimidation than New York.<br />They say the restrictive discovery rules put people like Mr. Cedres into a high-stakes dilemma: Plead guilty without seeing all the evidence, or risk a trial<br />that could end in a prison sentence much longer than what they might get under a plea.
