At least 40 employees in Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office have quit since the start of the year, The Post has learned — and insiders are blaming increased workloads tied to reforms that require them to provide evidence to defendants within 15 days of their arraignments.
Staring down the barrel of a hard deadline to get pages from police officers’ memo books, surveillance footage, phone records and other materials over to defense attorneys, prosecutors are routinely clocking 11 and 12-hour days to avoid losing their cases altogether, multiple sources told The Post.
“Morale is terrible,” one Brooklyn prosecutor said. “People are feeling overworked and underappreciated.”
Sources said that the grind since the reform took effect is so brutal, supervisors have had to order assistant DAs to stop working and go home for the sake of their sanity.
“People are kind of talking about it openly saying ‘I don’t know, should I ride this out?’” one Brooklyn prosecutor told The Post.
Another prosecutor said that the number of their colleagues dusting up their resumes is unlike anything they’ve seen in past years — and that some are blaming their tense new working conditions under discovery reform.
“Almost everyone I know is looking for another job,” the prosecutor said.
Brooklyn DA spokesman Oren Yaniv confirmed that 25 of the office’s roughly 530 employees have resigned so far this year. He said the office tends to have a 15 percent annual turnover rate.
“We have every confidence in the professionalism and dedication of our ADAs who work tirelessly to keep Brooklyn safe,” Gonazlez’s office said in a statement. “Implementing the new laws in the county with the largest caseload in the state requires our assistants to put in very long hours for the same pay.”
“Those who left the office are leaving for higher-paying jobs, including in other city agencies, because the city has not enacted salary parity despite repeated requests. We are now using recent funding to hire paralegals and other support staff to assist our hardworking prosecutors,” the statement continues.”
Changes to New York’s pretrial discovery laws took effect on Jan. 1 as part of a batch of sweeping criminal justice reforms that have drawn fire from law enforcement officials and some elected leaders — including a top Bronx judge who went public last week with his call to Albany lawmakers to “reform the reform.”
Brooklyn isn’t the only county where the new law is pushing prosecutors to the edge.
Last week, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced that ADAs on that side of the East River can count on an extra $60 on their paychecks for days where they work past 9 pm.
Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler, who also serves as president of the District Attorney’s Association of the State of New York, told The Post that the pain is being felt across the state.
He said that it’s particularly hard for small-town prosecutors who don’t have access to the technology that their New York City counterparts have at their disposal.
“You don’t have the time to spend on cases that you used to,” Hoovler said.