During the past three years, the City of Middletown under Mayor Joseph DeStefano enacted several codes to ramp up local prosecutions of low-level offenses.
Among them, an amended fireworks law and a new quality-of-life code took offenses traditionally in the domain of the county district attorney’s office into the hands of city prosecutors.
Swift fines are the most common punishment for city code violators.
The city got into the act as a direct response to the 2019 New York Bail Reform, according to Mr. DeStefano, who said a lesser-known part of the state law fastened the evidence production timeline for district attorneys and left them with less time for minor crimes….