In 2010, 17-year-old Kalief Browder was arrested for stealing a backpack. Because of prosecutorial delays, he ended up waiting for his day in court, on Rikers Island, for three years, much of it while in solitary. The enormous emotional toll of his confinement was said to have contributed to his ultimate suicide.
Browder’s story was one of the reasons back in 2020 that New York passed discovery reform, a law designed to make the legal system fairer by ensuring that prosecutors disclose evidence to the defense in a timely manner.
But recently, critics of those reforms, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, have argued that the law has led to case dismissals over minor technicalities…