NY Post
At least 40 employees in Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office have quit since the start of the year, The Post has learned — and insiders are blaming increased workloads tied to reforms that require them to provide evidence to defendants within 15 days of their arraignments.
Staring down the barrel of a hard deadline to get pages from police officers’ memo books, surveillance footage, phone records and other materials over to defense attorneys, prosecutors are routinely clocking 11 and 12-hour days to avoid losing their cases altogether, multiple sources told The Post.
“Morale is terrible,” one Brooklyn prosecutor said. “People are feeling overworked and underappreciated.”
Sources said that the grind since the reform took effect is so brutal, supervisors have had to order assistant DAs to stop working and go home for the sake of their sanity.
“People are kind of talking about it openly saying ‘I don’t know, should I ride this out?’” one Brooklyn prosecutor told The Post.
Another prosecutor said that the number of their colleagues dusting up their resumes is unlike anything they’ve seen in past years — and that some are blaming their tense new working conditions under discovery reform.
“Almost everyone I know is looking for another job,” the prosecutor said.
