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No sane person would pay a group to promote crime. Yet New York’s doing just that.
Since 2012, The Post reports, taxpayers have shelled out more than a $290 million to the Legal Aid Society — which, with other groups, is now using its resources to preserve “discovery” legal loopholes that let perps off on technicalities, even for the worst crimes.
The loopholes are largely the result of the 2019 “reform” to the discovery laws, requiring prosecutors to collect volumes of often irrelevant documents and share them with defense attorneys on a timeline that’s often impossible to meet.
Groups like Legal Aid then search for some document, any document, that didn’t get shared within the deadline — and poof: The judge throws out the case.
Victims, particularly women and kids in domestic-abuse cases, are left terrified, as their attackers are sent right back out onto the streets and they can’t even get restraining orders.
The number of cases dismissed or not prosecuted has soared. In the city, forced dismissals spiked from 8,282 in 2019 to a 45,970 last year — a 455% jump.
Meaning far too many criminals don’t even face charges. And sure enough, major crimes were up last year by 30% over 2019.
Gov. Hochul would tighten the law in ways that are simply common sense. She’d require defendants to show that any “failure” on evidence actually harmed their case, force them to file discovery complaints within 35 days and let judges issue other penalties besides dismissing a case on a technicality. This does nothing to harm the rights of victims, but also ensures those who have suffered from crime aren’t victimized again.
But Legal Aid and other lefty groups want the loopholes to remain: For them, the more criminals free, the better.
And too bad on law-abiding citizens yearning for public safety.
Worse, Legal Aid is using its resources, including taxpayer money, to lobby lawmakers to block Hochul’s reforms.
Some of its attorneys actually work as lobbyists, and the nonprofit pays $5,000 a month for outside lobbying as well.
Can anything be more rancid?
Good on Hochul for refusing to sign off on a spending plan that omits two important reforms: the discovery fixes and making it easier to commit mentally ill people badly in need of help, particularly violent ones — another reform lefties oppose.
The mission of public defenders like Legal Aid is a noble one — ensuring that everyone has the right to legal counsel.
But by strong-arming legislators and spending big on lobbying — using your money — the group is going beyond the right to counsel to the right to commit crime.
Defense lawyers are officers of the court, and must put justice, not loopholes for criminals, first.
If the state is going to keep on paying Legal Aid, the contracts should explicitly bar it from lobbying against the public interest.