Orange County DA cites data showing higher conviction rates than region

Orange County District Attorney David M. Hoovler used newly released state criminal justice data on July 7 to argue that Goshen prosecutors are handling felony and misdemeanor cases better than the broader Mid-Hudson region. The county said New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services figures show higher relative conviction and sentencing rates in both major offense categories, along with fewer cases resolved in favor of defendants.

Hoovler framed the numbers as the payoff from work that began in 2019, before New York’s 2020 criminal justice reforms and the pandemic hit the courts. In a Sept. 9, 2019 hearing before the New York State Senate Standing Committee on Codes, he said counties differed in technology, budgets and government structure and warned that “your zip code should not determine the justice you receive.” Orange County says its Early Case Assessment Bureau was the first of its kind outside New York City, and the office has linked that bureau to digital discovery and earlier case screening.

The state’s Criminal Justice Case Processing Reports are published quarterly and annually, and Orange County’s adult-arrests disposition file covers 2020 through 2024. The county’s own data sheet says the percentages are based on total dispositions, which means the headline rates measure how cases ended, not why they ended that way. The figures do not, by themselves, capture differences in charge severity, case complexity, staffing levels or local court pressures, even though the county is using them to argue that its pipeline moves cases with less friction than neighboring jurisdictions.

Orange County has made that same case before. A June 28, 2024 county release said criminal-case outcomes remained largely consistent before, during and after the reforms and the COVID pandemic, and the county said DCJS identified Orange County as an outlier because of that consistency. In 2023, Hoovler said the office had launched a Digital Forensics Unit and was rolling out the NICHE records management system to give law enforcement agencies more unified access to records.

Hoovler also won the New York Prosecutors Training Institute’s Prosecutor of the Year Award in 2021. The latest release gives him another data point in that argument, but the stakes extend beyond courtroom bragging rights: conviction and sentencing rates affect victim closure, defendant time in the system, jail populations, court calendars and the taxpayer cost of prolonged prosecutions.