Speedy trial entitlement. Just what does that mean?

[pravnik]

@Gadarene

As a former law clerk for a federal district court judge…

Me too! Secret handshake!

[paperbackwriter]

@BrotherCadfael

Thanks, Gfactor!

The case was in the news quite a bit up here. Based on news reports, here’s the sequence of events:

News reports about legal decisions are often inaccurate, and in this case they don’t match the sequence described in the opinion:

At the arraignment, the district court ordered that defendant be held without bail pending an evidentiary hearing, which defense counsel asked to be held at a later date. The evidentiary hearing was scheduled for August 15, but on August 14 the prosecutor and the public defender stipulated to continuing the hearing because defense counsel was moving his former private practice that day. Defense counsel indicated that defendant, although incarcerated, had consented to the continuance. On September 24, defendant filed a letter with the court complaining that he had been held without bail for more than sixty days, and yet, notwithstanding numerous telephone calls and letters, his counsel had not contacted him or engaged in any discovery in preparation of his defense.

After this, the delays were mostly caused by defense counsel’s inability to be prepared, not the defendant. The defendant opposed or did not consent to a number of the delays, and it is clear from the record that the defendant’ search for a competent, non-overextended attorney was probably justified. This isn’t the story of a man trying to manipulate hiring and firing attorneys to sabotage a speedy-trial requirement.

For example:

At a status conference on August 5, defendant’s fourth counsel stated that he needed an additional sixty days to prepare for trial because of his heavy case load and because “there seems to be a lot of discovery that [defendant’s] prior attorneys never got to for one reason or another.”

… A hearing on the motion was scheduled for November 26. The fifth judge to take part in this case presided at the hearing. Defense counsel indicated that he was in the process of getting out of the private practice of criminal defense work and that his contract with the defender general’s office had expired in June. He further stated that the defender general had indicated to him that he was going to reassign the case to someone more capable of dealing with it.

If even the public defender’s boss says the counsel isn’t paying enough attention to the case, you know something’s wrong.

[Albrecht_Durer]

In Indiana, Speedy Trial rights are taken care of under Rule of Criminal Procedure 4, which has three main subparts. Rule 4(a) says that if you’re in jail for more than 6 months without trial, you can released pending trial on your own recognizance (free bail, basically). Rule 4(b) says the the defense may make a motion at any time requesting trial within 70 days, barring certain exceptions in subpart (d). Subpart (c) is what you’re interested in, I think, which says that charges are to be dismissed (with prejudice, so they can’t refile) if they defendant has not been brought to trial within a year of their arrest or charging, whichever is later.
Just today I was working on a motion to dismiss for this very reason. The client was charged with a crime in February of 2007 and hasn’t yet been brought to trial. And I had to spend quite some time counting up the days, seeing which got attributed to the defendant and which to the state (much like it is in New York, apparently).

There was recently, in Indiana, a guy who murdered five members of his family had his convictions overturned because it took longer than a year to bring him to trial. There were the usual back-and-forth delays between the state and the defense before the state decided to spend a year and a half litigating with a mental health provider over the release of the records. They eventually won that argument and got the records, but since the defendant didn’t intercede in that debate, no time concerning the mental health records could be attributed to him. I can’t find a link, presently, but the case name is something like Pelley v. State, if anyone is interested.

In federal courts, they apply a case-by-case test to see if the defendant is prejudiced. see Barker v. Wingo. Under the Federal test, the courts will look to the reason (was the defendant in hiding, was the prosecutor an ass, etc.) and look to see if it actually made a difference or prejudiced the defendant.