Latest news with #NewYorkLegislature
Wall Street Journal
2 days ago
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
New York's Assisted-Suicide Mistake
New York's Legislature embraces every progressive cause, and the latest is making it easier for people to kill themselves. The state Senate voted 35-27 Monday to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, and let's hope that Gov. Kathy Hochul has the courage to veto it for the sake of society's most vulnerable. One irony is that New York passed the first U.S. law that banned assisting death in 1828. Eight years ago the New York Court of Appeals affirmed the state government 'has an interest in preserving life and preventing suicide.' But times and morals have changed. Life itself is less valued today than a life that is supposedly worth living. For Assemblywoman Amy Paulin this means being allowed to 'end unbearable suffering.' Eleven states and the District of Columbia have legalized assisted suicide since 1997. New York's proposal is for 'mentally competent' adults who have been given prognoses of six months or less to live. This sounds compassionate, but around the world it has proved to be a slippery slope. In Canada the 'medical assistance in dying' program has become at least the fifth-leading cause of death since 2015. The law has shed its original safeguards and in 2027 will be available to those with mental illness alone. It already is in parts of Europe. Oregon mandates a 15-day waiting period between a patient's first and second dying requests. New York's requires no delay, meaning a patient could receive a diagnosis one day and have a lethal cocktail the next if two physicians approve. Doctors needn't refer applicants for mental-health evaluations if they believe patients have the 'decision-making capacity' to make an 'informed decision.' This standard means there will soon be go-to suicide doctors.
New York Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Tweaked discovery laws still do not provide enough aid to boost liberal NY's abysmal conviction rate
An optimist will look at the discovery-law 'deal' that Gov. Hochul struck with the New York Legislature during budget negotiations and point to some 'wins.' Yes, language tweaks now slightly narrow the amount of valueless 'evidence' prosecutors must rapidly collect and softens some of their time pressures. Prosecutors will also have certain leeway to summarize pieces of evidence that they are still working to obtain — even if they haven't gotten their mitts on it in the allotted time. And judges can now assess prosecutors' diligence in this collection by evaluating the 'totality' of their effort — and not, more granularly, gauging their diligence in scrounging 'item by item' for each individual document, video, piece of metadata, etc. Provided judges are willing to use these new latitudes in the prosecution's favor, these shifts are good. They may help inch the NYC case-dismissal rate down from 62%, back toward the 42% rate before the extreme 2020 discovery law. In theory, this could correspondingly help boost the conviction rate from its abysmal current 26% toward the former 47% rate. Other positive tweaks put more onus on defense attorneys to do right. The bill expands their obligation to review evidence thoroughly, to proactively obtain evidence themselves, and to be more specific and collaborative if they claim evidence is missing. The amended law also restores a tinge more confidentiality for information like witness home addresses. And it makes grand-jury scheduling more reasonable. Law bias toward defendants A realist, however, will look at this deal and say: Hochul asked for way too little and got less. New York's discovery regime will remain the nation's most biased toward defendants — and most wasteful of taxpayer money and public-servant manhours. Prosecutors will still need to triage their caseloads, crippled by what remains an unreasonable compliance burden. This ensures less justice for the victims of crime — particularly 'lower level' crimes like domestic violence and drunken driving — and that criminals, too, will endure inconsistent and arbitrary outcomes. Zooming out, the positive but marginal improvements in this bill create a political reality in which New York won't reassess our radically pro-criminal rules of evidence collection for many moons. In a state where 'progressive' legislators dominate policymaking — often pushed even further left by their AOC-adoring staffers — these modest but substantive improvements to New York's discovery law may be something to celebrate. But the reality that Albany is ruled by an ideological distaste for imposing criminal consequences on those who break the law remains a big downer. Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.
