This week, New Yorkers learned that Governor Kathy Hochul is willing to hold the entire state budget hostage until lawmakers agree to gut the state's landmark 2019 discovery reforms.
One of the loudest proponents of Hochul's rollbacks to the reforms is NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who has repeatedly claimed that requiring prosecutors to show people accused of crimes the evidence against them in a timely way is driving a surge in violent repeat criminal acts. Tisch, fresh back from a whirlwind tour of Albany trying to sell lawmakers on the rollbacks, continued to beat the drum at a mayoral press conference Tuesday morning.
The criminal justice reforms of 2019 "created a revolving door out of our criminal justice system," Tisch told reporters. "It's a travesty."
Tisch insisted that while "the discovery law in particular needs to be tweaked," the changes she wants "by no means retreat from the spirit of the 2019 reforms."
"What we are looking for is to close some loopholes that render the criminal justice system in New York City or in New York state, a revolving door for recidivists," she said.
Tisch, Hochul, and the cops and prosecutors who are backing this effort are extremely disciplined in framing the discovery rollback as "common sense" "tweaks" that "honor the spirit of the original reforms" and "close unintended loopholes." As we've written before, that's a mischaracterization of such a scale that it begs to be called a lie.
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