The Task Force Zone
Consider, if you will, an enigma: Somewhere in the shadowy in-between realms of state government bureaucracy is a panel that exists — it’s even funded! — but it’s not really there.
You’ve entered … the Task Force Zone.
The Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct is New York’s latest phantom panel — listed for two years in the budget but unformed because its members are yet to be seated.
It joins the ranks of other state panels that floated through the bureaucratic twilight, unable to start work because their membership wasn’t in place: the road salt task force. The limousine safety task force. The Complete Count Commission — for that one, then- Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo didn’t make his appointments until more than two weeks after the panel’s report deadline.
In a 2019 Times Union roundup of task forces that never, or belatedly, got off the ground because of a lack of appointments, the Cuomo administration explained it took a long time to find and vet qualified people. Really? A year or more? Is there such a lack of qualified people willing to serve, and too few staffers who can vet them? We find that hard to believe.
The Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct is tasked with evaluating complaints of misconduct against prosecutors. In our current social moment, the urgency of this work — boosting transparency and accountability in the justice system — is obvious. But that’s the case with all these panels: They’re set up to address an urgent problem, yet filling the seats seems like it’s last on the priority list.
This recurring failure impedes important work, fuels cynical narratives about government ineptness, and feeds skepticism that announcements of task forces and commissions are little more than political grandstanding. Maybe it’s time to call for a state task force to investigate delays in establishing state task forces — a solution from a dimension not of space or time, but of dysfunction.
Cleaning the slate
The legalization of recreational cannabis wasn’t just about good times. A key goal was to undo some of the effects of overpolicing during the war on drugs — thus the priority licensing for “justice-involved” New Yorkers and the expungement of records for many offenses. But as The New York Times recently reported, for some people with marijuana convictions on their records, the process is a lot harder than it was meant to be.
The 2021 state cannabis law cleared many low-level convictions automatically, and since some crimes that previously were felonies are now misdemeanors or a lesser felony, other convicts can apply for expungement or a reduction in charge by filling out a simple form.
But some people convicted of felonies are barred from using that form — even though the law intended that they could — because the legislation left out a character, the Roman numeral i. “It’s literally a typo,” said a Legal Aid Society attorney.
Instead, they have to submit a motion in the court where they were convicted, and the original prosecutors are given a chance to fight the motion — which, as the Times reported, district attorneys in some counties have done.
Cleaning the slate is far from a symbolic gesture. Criminal records make it harder for a person to rent an apartment, get a loan or find a job. If the law isn’t working the way lawmakers intended it to work, then the next step is clear: Fix it.