SPEEDY TRIAL (Update 2)

The Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial continues not to be a subject of extensive litigation. Constitutional claims in most cases have been eclipsed by the Federal Speedy Trial Act and its state counterparts, which provide more detailed and demanding rules for prompt prosecution than the constitutional floor the Supreme Court has set in its interpretations of the Sixth Amendment right.

The four factors identified by the Court in barker v. wingo (1972)—whether delay before trial was uncommonly long; whether the government or defendant is more to blame for the delay; whether defendant, in due course, asserted his right to a speedy trial; and whether defendant suffered prejudice—still govern analysis of constitutional speedy trial claims. The case of Doggett v. United States (1992) provided a rare but instructive Court application of this test. Doggett was indicted for his alleged role in a drug conspiracy in 1980 and an arrest warrant was issued. When agents went to arrest him, however, they learned that he had left the country, possibly unaware of the fact that he had been indicted. The government took some measures to apprehend Doggett—sending word of the arrest warrant to customs officials and entering his name, temporarily, in an international computer system—but did not take other measures that they might easily have employed if they had been anxious to catch him. Two years later, Doggett reentered the country under his own name, unhindered by customs officials, and resettled. It was not until 1988 that the U.S. Marshal's Service conducted a simple credit check on persons with outstanding arrest warrants and, in a few minutes, found Doggett's address. Doggett was arrested and, not surprisingly, raised a speedy trial challenge to his prosecution, brought eight and one-half years after his indictment.

Applying the Barker v. Wingo test, the Court ruled in his favor, holding that the extraordinarily long delay was due to the government's negligence, and that since the government stipulated that Doggett might have been unaware of the indictment, he could not be faulted for having failed to invoke his right to be tried promptly. The weakness in Doggett's case was that he could not show precisely how his ability to defend himself might have been prejudiced. The Court, however, held that so lengthy a delay was "presumptively prejudicial," an expansive approach that dismayed four dissenting Justices. This generosity was warranted for, as the majority pointed out, it may be virtually impossible in some cases for a defendant to establish, years after the relevant events, that the delay has caused any particular form of evidence to disappear.

Although prejudice is only one of four factors considered under the constitutional test, the Court in dicta in another case, Reed v. Farley (1994), made a surprising comment on this factor in the course of discussing whether speedy trial provisions of the Interstate Agreement on Detainers "effectuated" the constitutional right: "A showing of prejudice is required to establish a violation of the Sixth Amendment Speedy Trial Clause, and that necessary ingredient is missing here." Although this comment was in dicta and therefore does not change the previous law that a showing of prejudice would not necessarily be required if the defendant had a particularly strong case on the other factors, if a majority of the Court now believes that prejudice should be a threshold showing for a constitutional claim, future cases may call the long-settled law of Barker v. Wingo and even the newer presumptive prejudice holding of Doggett into question.

Susan N. Herman
(2000)

Bibliography

Guidelines for Application of Federal Speedy Trial Act 1985 Federal Rules Decisions 106:271.