Jason Schmidt is pictured in October 2020 during a debate leading up to the election for Chautauqua County district attorney . P-J file photo

MAYVILLE — In the run-up to the 2020 election for Chautauqua County district attorney, Jason Schmidt often seized upon the decreasing felony conviction rate as a key campaign talking point.

“I’ve never seen how we can go down as a county that far. … It just doesn’t make sense,” he said during a debate with Patrick Swanson, then the incumbent DA.

Today, those words appear to have boomeranged on Schmidt as the felony conviction rate in Chautauqua County has fallen even further — currently among the lowest in New York state — while the number of charges dismissed has risen significantly.

According to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, the county had an 8.4% felony conviction rate for adults in 2022. That means of the 1,117 cases disposed of last year in which the most serious charge was a felony, just 94 resulted in a felony conviction.

In 2021, the year Schmidt took office as the county’s lead prosecutor, the DA’s office had a 9.7% felony conviction rate.

Schmidt, while acknowledging the drop in convictions for adults charged with felonies, said the rates for 2021 and 2022 “don’t tell the full story.” In a recent interview, the district attorney noted the slow return to normal court proceedings post-COVID and reforms to bail and discovery that have made preparing for trials much tougher.

“When we came into office Jan. 1, 2021, we were dealing with a closed system and a backlog of cases that had not been prosecuted or adjudicated in any manner for the prior year or so,” Schmidt said. “That led us to have to audit all of our files to determine which of those cases were actually time dead themselves.”

He added, “Beyond that, we also were dealing with a completely closed, shutdown court system where we were not in a position where we could actually prosecute some of the cases. As our courts opened up, we then had to make decisions as to which cases were prosecutable under the law, which included executive orders such as speedy trial statutes. That led to a number of dismissals outright that were the result of the prior administration and then the reality of what we’re dealing with now.”

Only one county in New York had a lower felony conviction rate last year, that being Kings County with an estimated population of about 2.59 million. Two other counties — Bronx and Queens — also had an 8.4% felony conviction rate last year.

Locally, Erie County had a felony conviction rate of 19% in 2022. Cattaraugus County had a conviction rate of 18.4% while Allegany had a rate of 22%.

BY THE NUMBERS

Under Swanson, the Chautauqua County District Attorney’s Office had a 21.5% felony conviction rate in 2018 and a 17.2% rate in 2019. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic limited most court functions, the rate dropped to 11.3%.

The majority of felony arrests locally result in convictions for misdemeanors or non-criminal offenses. In 2022, 35.2% of felony cases resulted in a misdemeanor conviction.

Andrew Molitor, first assistant district attorney, said a “large number” of cases had to be dismissed coming into 2021 due to a lack of an indictment or declaring a readiness for trial. That year, just over 21% of felony charges ended up being dismissed. Last year, dismissals rose to 25%.

Under Section 30.30 of the state criminal procedure law, prosecutors must be ready to try a felony within six months from the initiation of the charge. Prosecutors also have 90 days to try serious misdemeanors, 60 days for lesser misdemeanors and 30 days for violations.

According to a recent report by the Albany Times Union, tens of thousands of criminal cases across the state have been dismissed by judges in the last four and a half years due to missing speedy trial deadlines. Statewide, there was a 161% increase in such dismissals, the newspaper said.

“If a case was already time dead, which means it wasn’t declared ready or it was very, very close but they had failed to go to grand jury … then that case was already time dead and there was nothing we could do,” Molitor said. “It’s a statutory requirement.”

In January 2021, the DA’s office audited its open cases, ranking them based on the severity of charges — homicides, violent felonies and child sex crimes, among others.

“My focus has to be on the most serious cases that impact all of us,” Schmidt said. “Those are the most important cases that have to be given the most attention. Now, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the cases aren’t as important. They are. It’s just that we simply are not at a place where the legislature has recognized all the burdens that are placed on us by the changes in the law in Albany.”

Schmidt and Molitor said reforms to the state’s discovery law in 2020 have played a role as well. Prosecutors are required to disclose evidence to the defense earlier in case proceedings. The DA’s office, the pair said, is handling far more evidence from police departments, which is placing a burden on staff to ensure discovery rules are met.

“It encompasses more material than ever before,” Schmidt said. “It’s constantly expanding, that universe of material.”

Added Molitor, “We can’t say we’re ready for trial until we’ve turned everything over and filed a document called a certificate of compliance. So, certainly, within that first year and even into 2022, the focus was on violent felonies, homicides, child sex abuse cases and guns and drugs.”

In 2022, counties statewide had a felony conviction rate of 15.8%, representing a bump of nearly 3% from 2021 coming out of the pandemic. In 2018, the rate was 19.9%, the last time Chautauqua County topped the statewide average when the local DA’s office successfully prosecuted 21.5% of felony arrests.

SOME TRIAL WINS, AND SOME SETBACKS

Since taking office, Schmidt’s office has obtained a number of high-profile felony convictions at trial.

In April, Silver Creek resident Dustin Post was sentenced to 125 years to life after he was accused of sexually abusing multiple children from 2015 to 2019 in northern Chautauqua County.

Georgia resident Heather Capell was sentenced to several years in state prison for a July 2021 wrong-way crash on Interstate 86 that killed a Cattaraugus County man.

In June, Jamestown resident Randall Rolison pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter for a hit-and-run crash that killed a girl in December 2021 and to aggravated vehicular homicide for another crash that killed a woman in December 2022. The separate cases brought on plenty of attention to the DA’s office to get convictions.

Rolison has not yet been sentenced in county court.

And just last week, Jamestown resident Jonathan Camacho-Monge pleaded guilty to a first-degree manslaughter charge for an October 2021 shooting that killed another person. He faces up to two decades in prison when sentenced in November.

There have been some setbacks as well.

During a January 2022 bench trial, a Buffalo judge found a former Lakewood man not guilty of second-degree vehicular manslaughter for a crash on Route 60 that killed a 7-year-old girl.

At the Capell trial, a jury found her not guilty on the most serious charge — second-degree manslaughter. “You have to respect the jury’s decision,” Schmidt told The Post-Journal at the time. “It’s very upsetting for the family. … We really wanted this for them.”