Fairness on trial
New York’s top jurist is demanding that all criminal court judges make prosecutors turn over certain types of evidence to the defense at least 30 days before trial. Chief Judge Janet DiFiore’s edict is a meaningful step toward fairness. But it’s only a patchwork fix to a backward state justice system that needs much deeper legal surgery.
At the heart of America’s adversarial system for determining criminal guilt is a process known as discovery, whereby the prosecution must reveal all its evidence, including and especially facts that might clear an individual of the crime for which he or she is set to stand trial.
The duty to turn over such evidence is rooted in the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which safeguards the rights of a defendant “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” and “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
Extrapolating on that guarantee, the Supreme Court in 1963 ruled in Brady vs. Maryland that prosecutors have a special responsibility to hand over anything in their files that could be construed as being favorable to the defense.
New York’s laws are an embarrassment to these core American principles. Unlike in almost all other states, district attorneys here are able to wait until the last minute, then spring on the defense what they’ve known all along.
In the most egregious cases, what’s withheld is exculpatory — meaning it might exonerate a client. A witness says they saw the accused at a time and in a place inconsistent with where the crime took place. Blood and fingerprints found at the scene contradict cops’ narrative. And so on.
Thanks to DiFiore’s order, that will now have to be turned over in a more timely fashion.
But the prosecution can also under law refuse, for weeks and months, to turn over details as basic as who the accuser is, what they say happened and what the police investigated.
That stacks the deck, hamstrings a person’s ability to mount an effective defense — and can even result in false convictions.
Broad new standards protecting the rights of the accused to see and analyze all the evidence against them as early as possible must be written into New York law. As with the administration of justice itself, needless delay is unconscionable.