Legal Aid Demands DA Katz Improve Evidence-Sharing Practices

QUEENS – The public advocacy group Legal Aid is demanding Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz improve the system the office uses to share and organize evidence, claiming an updated system could impede court delays.

The call comes after the state reformed criminal discovery laws in 2019, ensuring prosecutors disclose key evidence in a timely fashion to the defense. Legal Aid said district attorneys in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island have so far implemented a system that complies with these laws.

“For over two years, public defenders throughout Queens have dealt with this unfair and illogical practice, which undercuts discovery reform and contributes to court delays,” said Diana Nevins, staff attorney with the Queens Trial Office at The Legal Aid Society.

The public advocates said the office’s practice of failing to organize documents in a “logical way” has impacted all 41,231 homicide, felony, and misdemeanor Legal Aid cases in the borough.

The group said it has met with Katz several times in the last two years to raise these concerns but “the office has so far refused to implement any changes to the practice.”

Legal Aid cited an example when they received over 400 unnamed documents, with many of them duplicates, and required additional hours of work from counsel to open, review and organize each file.

"We process materials electronically, rather than by hand, expediting the information-sharing process and enabling us to get more discovery into the hands of defense counsel sooner," said a spokesperson for the district attorney's office. "Defense counsel sorts and categorizes those materials however they think is most useful to them."