Come to Manhattan Criminal Court any day of the week and you’ll see prosecutors from my office arguing their cases, fighting for accountability for crimes that occur in this borough. 

You will also see them pushing giant metal carts, filled to the brim with stacks of thousands of papers and files.

This is discovery — materials relevant to the case, like witness statements and DNA test results.

It also includes a great deal of much less relevant material, like battery logs for police officers’ body-worn cameras and administrative records showing where in the courthouse a defendant was held. By law, prosecutors must disclose these materials to the defense at the very earliest stage of a case.

Ever since I became a prosecutor in 2003, I have been committed to robust and early discovery. But soon after I was elected Manhattan’s district attorney, it became abundantly clear to me that New York state’s 2019 discovery law — the recently revised statute dictating what materials are to be disclosed to the defense and when — had dire unintended consequences.

Case outcomes were being determined not by the evidence in a case, but by a prosecutor’s ability to produce reams of records having nothing to do with........

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