No it can't be reduced to an infraction because there is no such thing in New York.
No it can't be reduced to an infraction because there is no such thing in New York.
If the prosecutor has a weak case and the defendant is afraid to go to trial, it very well could end up as a plea to either simple battery or even disorderly conduct. Happens all the time.
No separate battery charge in NY, it all falls under assault and "simple" doesn't enter into it. It's assault of several degrees none of which are violations (i.e., less than misdemeanor).
Surely you are making a joke. You seriously mean that a New York attorney would not understand what an attorney from another state means when he differentiates between DV and simple battery? Even though New York calls it assault, I know for a fact that all licensed attorneys in NY went to law school, and while in law school they studied the common law, and therefore they would absolutely know what I'm talking about when I differentiate between DV and simple battery. Any attorney who truly could not understand me (as opposed to pretending not to) is too stupid to be practicing law, frankly.
Charges are amended all the time to legally fictitious charges in order to dispose of a case without trial. Resolving a DV case to disorderly conduct, for example, is a legal fiction because the facts rarely satisfy the elements of disorderly conduct. Prosecutors will often make such a concession and the parties stipulate to a factual basis for the purposes of the plea. On some occasions it can even be amended to a civil offense. Resolving a criminal trespass case on railroad tracks can be amended to a civil pedestrian violation, for example, in exchange for a plea.
You can amend things to a charge which may not describe what actually happened as long as the defendant will plead guilty. However, you got to make it something that is "non-fiction" in that it's an existant law. You just can't invent a statute.
A legal fiction is an assertion accepted as true, though fictitious, to achieve a particular goal in a legal matter. In the case of amending to disorderly conduct, the fiction is that one of the elements of disorderly conduct is that the public peace is disturbed. With DV, that seldom occurs in public (though sometimes it does). So amending to a charge that could not be proven in exchange for a plea is fictitious in the sense that the person is pleading to something they did not do in exchange for not being prosecuted for what the state alleges they did do. I wasn't proposing inventing statutes, just shoe-horning the facts of one offense into another one where they actually don't fit. It's done all the time.