Cabán knows the criminal justice system intimately, due to her experience as a public defender. And her ideas for fixing the system, in practice, aren’t as radical as one might expect. It starts, she explains, before trial, with prosecutors handing over evidence.

“When you don't have the evidence, how can you move forward with a case?” Cabán asked rhetorically, sitting at a long picnic table in her Jackson Heights campaign office early on a weekday morning last month. “When you don't have the evidence, how can your client make a decision on whether to take a plea or not? When you don't have the evidence, how can you prepare for a trial?”

In many states, evidence is handed over to the defense right away. The defense has all the information needed to write a big omnibus motion addressing all of the issues. But the way it has typically worked in New York is that the D.A. shares information bit by bit, Cabán said, and every time the defense gets a new piece of information, they have to write a new motion. And the clock stops ticking. The prosecutor is entitled to time to respond. The clock stops again. And so now you’ve lost, say, two to three months of time, just like that.

In fact, Cabán was transitioned off a murder case when she decided to run for office – and her former client still awaits trial. He has been in jail for two years.

As the nation comes to grips with the crisis of mass incarceration, activists, researchers and politicians are zeroing in on prosecutors as primary drivers of this problem – and in fact, New York passed legislation a little over a month ago that requires prosecutors to share this evidence early on in a case. Cabán, who served as a public defender for seven years, thinks the D.A.’s office, which sets the pace for the courts, is primarily responsible for dragging out the trial process by deferring proceedings and withholding evidence. She says it’s the first thing she will change if she is elected Queens County’s next district attorney.