Apparently, the New York state Legislature is not finished with its persistent campaign to disrespect and damage the rights of crime victims while simultaneously making it infinitely more difficult to hold convicted criminals responsible for their actions.
Its latest bill, inaccurately named the “Wrongful Conviction Act,” could be the worst of all.
The WCA is a hastily drafted, last-minute piece of legislation that was just passed — at a time when lawmakers hope no one was paying attention.
Th act will eviscerate any hope of having finality in our criminal-justice system and will result in infinite appeals in the same cases and more criminals released onto our streets
It is guaranteed to create more crime victims. Just what we need!
I call on Gov. Kathy Hochul to exercise her veto power and stop the bill from becoming law to prevent fatal harm to our criminal-justice system.
The act is packaged as a mechanism to prevent wrongful conviction — a perfectly fine goal of allowing “innocent” people to challenge past convictions.
Yet New York already leads the nation in post-conviction relief and provides numerous pathways for defendants to challenge their convictions.
Apart from the normal appeal process, post-conviction relief is already available for newly discovered evidence, exoneration through DNA, coerced or misunderstood guilty pleas, prosecutorial or police misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, retroactive changes in the law and failure to warn of immigration consequences.
Under this bill, defendants would be allowed infinite meritless challenges to criminal convictions.
If their motion gets denied, they can file it again and again, as often as they like.
They can wait decades and then file the identical motion again.
Perhaps most alarming, if a defendant succeeds on a challenge to their conviction, under current law they get a new trial.
Yet under this misguided legislation, they walk free and can never be tried again for that crime.
This is true even where the error is due to an ineffective defense attorney, something that the trial judge and prosecutor cannot prevent.
Under this bill, murderers will be incentivized to hire the worst attorney they can find, get convicted and have the case thrown out without a possibility of a retrial.
The bill is also poorly drafted, allowing trial-level courts to review decisions made by appellate courts and not even requiring defendant to swear that their claims are true.
It’s also a discovery nightmare requiring prosecutors to provide discovery and hold onto evidence in perpetuity to respond to motions on decades-old cases because the bill allows courts to vacate a judgment if evidence is no longer available.
Were you a crime victim or witness a long time ago?
Have you put the pain and anxiety of that terrible experience behind you?
Tough.
You are about to be called back in for these motions.
And when you are, it probably will not be for the last time.
No conviction will ever be final.
No case will ever be “over” and an endless stream of guilty defendants will be exonerated on a myriad of seemingly unending technicalities created by our out-of-control Legislature.
These are just a few examples from yet another horrendous piece of “criminal justice” legislation that would have swift, severe, and painful consequences for law-abiding citizens of New York.
It is an unnecessary “fix” for a system that is not broken.
By eliminating finality in convictions, the bill undermines the rights of victims, burdening them with eternal anxiety and hopelessness.
Our Legislature has forgotten the victims of crime.
Prosecutors across the state have borne the burden of attempting to maintain public safety while working in a system increasingly rigged to subvert justice.
This bill goes too far, as it will cause an immediate explosion of meritless appeals, which will deplete law enforcement resources, already stretched to the breaking point.
Again, I ask the governor to remember those victims.
Please Gov. Hochul, exercise your veto power to prevent this atrocious bill from becoming an unconscionable law.
The integrity of our criminal-justice system is at stake.
Ray Tierney is the district attorney of Suffolk County. He has been a prosecutor for over 30 years.