The wrangling in Albany over New York’s dangerous discovery law only highlights Gov. Hochul’s ineptitude — while putting all of us at continued risk.

The state budget is on hold as leftist legislators, pushed by big-money progressive lobbyists, dig in to preserve an irresponsible 2020 “reform” that all but decriminalized wildly dangerous offenses by making them functionally impossible to prosecute.

Hochul is trying to make some mild amendments to the law within her budget-making process — the same backdoor mechanism that established it.

Instead, she should push for a new, separate bill that truly fixes the current law, which puts meaningless paperwork above protecting New Yorkers.

The recent dismissal of the case against Reuben St. Marc is the perfect example.

A year ago, St. Marc was arraigned on Long Island for driving while intoxicated.

Prosecutors collected reams of material showing their “readiness for trial” and passed it to St. Marc’s attorneys before the mandated June 24, 2024 deadline. The evidence included body-worn camera footage from the Nassau County Police Department officers who arrested St. Marc.

But on March 21 Nassau District Court Judge David W. Wright dismissed the case for reasons that only exist under New York’s unhinged discovery law.

St. Marc’s attorneys claimed that prosecutors had not met the deadline because they failed to provide audit trail data for the cops’ body-worn cameras.

Let’s be clear: Prosecutors provided the actual footage that actually showed the incident.

Prosecutors explained to Wright that Nassau County PD’s contract with GETAC, the tech company that handles their body-worn cameras, does not provide audit trails — and not even the most diligent attorney can gather evidence the police themselves don’t have.

More significantly, GETAC does provide the videos’ metadata, including all the information an audit trail would provide. And the prosecutors did turn over the cameras’ metadata to the defendant.

In other words, prosecutors shared all the useless information the discovery law pointlessly demands — just in a different form.

But the judge insisted that if a “contract limitation between law enforcement and a third party vendor” could excuse prosecutors from providing records mandated by the punctilious discovery law, then cops and prosecutors could start creating contracts merely to hide behind them.

Wright explicitly ruled that the format of the information collected and shared by prosecutors meant the blanket obligation of the discovery law had not been fulfilled — so St. Marc walked.

Which raises the question: why do we have such a stupid, pedantic law?

Do New Yorkers prefer prosecutors to painstakingly collect patently useless “evidence” — or to collect whatever is relevant to show whether Reuben St. Marc was driving around Long Island blotto?

Remember: DWI case are rarely litigated with metadata and audit trails — the actual video footage of the defendant’s arrest, and other evidence of his state, usually does the trick.

Under Hochul’s painfully modest proposal, prosecutors would still have to hunt down that audit trail data (despite it being a waste of taxpayer-funded time).

They would just be allowed more time to submit it — rather than swallow an immediate dismissal over mere grunt-work that has nothing to do with justice.

Yet even this slight improvement to a pernicious law is being blocked by “progressive” legislators.

That’s not surprising: Discovery “reform” was never about making the system fairer.

Its excesses — and its triumphs — are fundamentally aimed at handicapping prosecutors and allowing more criminals to skate away from what progressives call a “systemically racist” criminal justice system.

In that, it has been successful.

Under the discovery law, there’s been a stomach-clenching drop in criminal consequences for DWIs and other vehicle traffic law offenses.

Prosecutors dismissed or declined an average of 19% of VTL arrests during the four years prior to discovery reform.

That number skyrocketed to an average of 51% of VTL cases dismissed or declined in the four years since — even though the total number of arrests dropped significantly, which should have made prosecuting these cases easier. 

Over half of criminal drivers now face no consequences. And yes, it’s killing people.

Traffic fatalities soared by 26% following the discovery law, according to the state comptroller’s office.

Further, the share of traffic fatalities related to DWI has also been consistently mounting. By 2023, 50 NYC traffic deaths were directly tied to DWI, a 24% increase over the prior three-year average, according to the city Department of Transportation.

Indeed, more than 30% of crashes statewide now involve alcohol.

We’ll never know if St. Marc was guilty of downing, say, tequila shots and then zipping around Massapequa.

His case — like so many others involving dangerous criminal behavior — was decided not on its merits, but on an anti-prosecution loophole created by an irresponsible law.

Hochul’s choice to bury this fight within Albany’s secret budget negotiations deprives New Yorkers of open debate and accountability.

Yes, her proposed tweaks would be better than nothing — but a watered-down amendment would be the worst of both worlds, precluding real change any time soon.

The heated debate over discovery shows how much support serious fixes would have — from both sides of the political aisle — if she pushed outright for them in the standard legislative process this spring.

Let’s have that battle in the sunlight, not in the budget shadows.

Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.