UNKNOWN
1:59:00
And I've been out public fender in this city for approximately 30 years.
1:59:06
Now, this hearing is rightly about our immediate present and one hopes our immediate future, but I do wanna shift the focus a little bit to a reckoning with our past.
1:59:18
And what I mean by that is a lot of the reforms that have come up during this hearing are laudable ones, certainly beginning with discovery reform.
1:59:26
The landscape of of all of this, but including things like videotaping confessions and the use of double blind principles in identification procedures, and and of course body cam footage.
1:59:39
All these things, it's important to remember that these are all very recent development in our system.
1:59:45
Even discovery reform is not even has its 5th year anniversary yet.
1:59:49
And these other things that we're talking about are even more recent and even younger practices than that.
1:59:55
So when I say taking us back to the past, I want you to think about the decades of convictions that were secured in the absence of discovery, in the absence of interrogations being recorded in the absence of body cam footage and surveillance footage, things like cell site that could have established people's innocence.
2:00:19
Those are decades of convictions.
2:00:22
I think we can conclude with a moral certainty that a significant percentage of those were wrongful convictions.
2:00:29
I think we can conclude with a moral certainty, unfortunately.
2:00:32
There are great many people right now as we conduct this hearing.
2:00:36
Or rotting in prisons, our prisons for crimes, they did not commit.
2:00:42
Now, our office has been one of the driving forces behind something called the Challenging Rolfo Convictions Act.
2:00:48
Because in addition to the decades of you know, really scary types of convictions.
2:00:56
New York happens to have one of the most abysmal statutes schemes for addressing wrongful convictions.
2:01:02
1, a scheme that our highest court has said does not recognize innocent as a basis for relief.
2:01:08
A statutory scheme that does not give those willing working to challenge their wrongful convictions the access to an attorney or the discovery.
2:01:17
Chaunching World for Commissions Act would address all of that.
2:01:21
This council last year created a resolution 479 of 2023.
2:01:26
Urging the New York State legislature to pass and the governor to sign the challenging wrongful convictions act.
2:01:32
Unfortunately, perhaps in a bit of complacency or overconfidence because it did pass both houses last year.
2:01:40
That resolution was never passed.
2:01:42
So I'm calling on this body to resurrect that resolution, to put pressure, to the extent we can on Albany, As I said, it passed both houses and the governor ultimately gave into fear mongry at the last minute and vetoed it.
2:01:55
I think this is the year that we need to not just do what this hearing is doing, which is think about our future and how we can avoid wrongful convictions, but this is the year New York really has to get serious about addressing its wrongful conviction.
2:02:09
Probably remember, 3rd in the nation of in wrongful convictions.
2:02:15
So this is the the year that that New York County Defender Services and myself, and and we hope this council can get serious about addressing this moral injustice.
