Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced essential changes to New York's Discovery Laws alongside New York District Attorneys, domestic violence survivors and advocates. Part of the FY26 State Budget agreement, these discovery reforms build upon Governor Hochul’s record investments in proven crime prevention initiatives, while holding perpetrators accountable and safeguarding the right to a fair and speedy trial in New York State. The Governor also allocated $135 million in the State Budget for both prosecutors and defenders across the State to help ensure compliance with discovery.
VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).
AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.
PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Thank you. Thank you all so much. Four months ago, I vowed to end the insanity of letting dangerous offenders walk free on minor technicalities. I vowed to protect the rights of defendants and hold more criminals accountable. And I vowed to stand up for victims – for too many years, have felt their voices did not matter and make sure they had the justice they deserve. And you all know this, I vowed I would not sign off on a state budget unless it included common sense discovery reforms. And guess what? We got it done.
I want to – first of all – thank our host, the New York County Courthouse and our home district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Thank you for all your advocacy and all of our fellow DAs – if I had a better voice, this is only allergies. I'm not contagious. Everybody looks at me like, “Does she have something we have to watch out for?” I'm fine. Just don't sound like it.
So all of our DAs have been introduced, but my gosh – when they team up together for a cause, not just the boroughs, but also our statewide district attorneys who really banded together to fight for common sense changes. I want to thank them for everything they did.
Kathy Wylde was a driving force on behalf of the New York City Partnership as well, thank you. My staff worked relentlessly on this issue because they knew they were not going home until we got it done. I want to thank them for hanging in there. Karen. Karen Persichilli Keogh, my Secretary of the Governor. Brian Mahanna, my counsel, who's fairly new on the job, and I hope he stays after all this. My policy director Jackie Bray, and the commissioners you heard spoken of as well.
This is just the power of an idea and what can happen when people mobilize to do the right thing. And that's exactly what happened here. And I'm talking about, like I said, the DAs and the advocates. I did so many round tables with advocates. Many times victims of domestic violence who felt like people just ignored them, that their voices didn't matter at all, that they just were meaningless.
And event, after event, after event – I knew we could not let them down. And to the brave survivors who came forward of all crimes, they spoke so eloquently about painful experiences because they wanted there to be a change for the people who come after them. And that is such an inspiration for me. So to all of them, this victory belongs to everyone in this room and everyone out there who fought so hard for this. Give yourselves a round of applause.
I'll say it again, my number one priority as your Governor is to keep everyone safe. We fixed the flawed bail laws. We drove down gun violence rates to near historic lows. We're focused on safety. We strengthened our red flag laws. No other state is doing what we're doing and stopping people from having access to guns who could do harm to others.
We secured unprecedented dollars for our district attorneys and our defenders so they could do their jobs and fight domestic violence. We cracked down on retail theft. We also saw that our subways have become a frightening place. And with our dollars at the state level, made sure that there's at least two police officers on every single overnight train and people are feeling better, and the rates of crime are going down.
And I want to say – none of this means anything, though, if we have the police officers who arrest an offender, bring them downtown. And people who do harm to others get cycled in and out, over and over and over because of an inane loophole that allows that to happen.
Now, back in 2019, our state legislature made some long overdue reforms. They were important, and I stand behind many of them because the system was skewed against the defendants. And I want to thank the legislature for what they did then. In public life, we often have to be watching what is happening and look at the data. Five years down the road, what has happened? I'll tell you what has happened.
The pendulum went from one extreme to the other extreme, and we had to do something about it. Suddenly, rock solid cases are being thrown out over minor, minor prosecution omissions that had nothing to do with the merits of the case. Not at all.
Statewide dismissals jumped from 10,000 in 2019 to over 50,000 in 2024. That's an enormous number of people who never had their day in court. Never had the sense of vindication or justice for victims. Because behind every one of these senseless dismissal is someone who put themselves out there, or a family that put themselves out there. In some cases, they put themselves in danger.
You think of a young mother trapped in an abusive relationship, and she finally has the courage to come forward and tell her story of what has happened to her in the sanctity of her home, a place that's supposed to be full of love. Takes a lot of courage. I know, because that's the kind of household my own mother was raised in until her abusive father finally moved out and left her and her mom alone. And my mother channeled that experience, not to become jaded and turn against others, but to feel such enormous empathy for victims of domestic violence, something that I share with her.
So when I think about these people who finally come forward at their own risk, or an innocent commuter whose life is cut short by a drunken driver, someone riding on a subway train who just wants to get to work safely, not be bothered, and someone viciously assaults them, or even a small business owner like my friend Deborah Koenigsberger, whose shop has been repeatedly, repeatedly ransacked by retail thieves. She worked so hard. We did an event with her. And her store is magnificent, but she never knows where the little bell rings on the door, someone walks in, are they going to just steal what she worked so hard to put on her shelves? She's here today. Deborah, can you stand up?
These are the people we have been fighting for. And while I started this conversation way back in January — it seems like an eternity ago, my State of the State — each of you have carried the message forward, developing support for something where there had been none. You lobbied our legislators, you spoke with the journalists, you wrote columns, you told your stories and you brought this story to the forefront and ultimately persuaded the legislators to rebalance the scales of justice. That's all we're looking for, rebalancing the scales of justice.
And especially our DAs who stepped up and had to leave their jobs and be on late-night phone calls on Easter morning and on Passover, and taking time from their families, working with, particularly, Carl Heastie, the Speaker, who was persuaded that this is something that needed to happen. And I thank him and Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins for finally, after many, many weeks of hard fought negotiations and conversations, helping us get to a place where we finally can do justice for these people.
So cases will no longer be thrown out over trivial errors that have no bearing on someone's guilt or innocence, like hitting the wrong button on a surveillance video or submitting a police personnel file just a day late. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. But that's what the law was, that they had to throw those out. Or leaving out a minor report that already has a duplication, has no bearing on the case at all.
So for the first time, we'll be easing this enormous burden on our prosecutors by narrowing what they have to turn over. It's that simple. And we're ending the gotcha game where defense lawyers cannot wait till the last possible second and raise a perceived discovery omission, say “Gotcha, now it's going to be thrown out.” They perfected this, many of them. And who's left behind? A victim without justice.
So this means prosecutors can focus where it matters — focus on the real evidence, focus on accountability and focus on justice for victims. Now, as I said, I've said all along, I would hold up over a $250 billion Budget on this issue. And here's why, behind all the legal jargon that some may not quite comprehend, there's real people's lives at stake here. That's why I wouldn't leave. That's why I couldn't walk away from this fight.
You can't have violent criminals or people who are offenders who hurt other human beings be able to walk free because of evidence that was irrelevant but might have been excluded. Now, we want them to have justice. We want there to be fairness in court. Of course there'll always be, that's why everyone who's an elected official takes an oath of office. I took the same oath of office. But we have to think about the consequences on real people for the first time in a long time.
Now, I want to make sure that when we look at this together, look back at this arduous struggle, we'll say we fought, we won and we got it done. Thank you very much.
Let me turn it over to our President of the District Attorney's Association, statewide, Richmond County District Attorney Michael McMahon.