Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/647/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 01:59:35+00:00

Document:
In February 1980, petitioner Doggett was indicted on federal drug charges, but he left the country before the Drug Enforcement Agency could secure his arrest. The DEA knew that he was later imprisoned in Panama, but after requesting that he be expelled back to the United States, never followed up on his status. Once the DEA discovered that he had left Panama for Colombia, it made no further attempt to locate him. Thus, it was unaware that he reentered this country in 1982 and subsequently married, earned a college degree, found steady employment, lived openly under his own name, and stayed within the law. The Marshal's Service eventually located him during a simple credit check on individuals with outstanding warrants. He was arrested in September 1988, 81/2 years after his indictment. He moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the Government's failure to prosecute him earlier violated his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial, but the District Court denied the motion, and he entered a conditional guilty plea. The Court of Appeals affirmed.
guished. Nor does Doggett's failure to cite any specifically demonstrable prejudice doom his claim, since excessive delay can compromise a trial's reliability in unidentifiable ways. Presumptive prejudice is part of the mix of relevant Barker factors and increases in importance with the length of the delay. Here, the Government's egregious persistence in failing to prosecute Doggett is sufficient to warrant granting relief. The negligence caused delay six times as long as that generally deemed sufficient to trigger judicial review, and the presumption of prejudice is neither extenuated, as by Doggett's acquiescence, nor persuasively rebutted. Pp.651-658.
906 F.2d 573, reversed and remanded.
SOUTER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which WHITE, BLACKMUN, STEVENS, and KENNEDY, JJ., joined. O'CONNOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, post, p. 658. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and SCALIA, J., joined, post, p. 659.
Wm. J. Sheppard reargued the cause for petitioner. With him on the briefs was Elizabeth L. White.
Deputy Solicitor General Bryson reargued the cause for the United States. Assistant Attorney General Mueller argued the cause for the United States on the original argument. With them on the briefs were Solicitor General Starr, Ronald J. Mann, and Patty Merkamp Stemler.
In this case we consider whether the delay of 81/2 years between petitioner's indictment and arrest violated his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial. We hold that it did.
under Driver's orders to arrest Doggett at his parents' house in Raleigh, North Carolina, only to find that he was not there. His mother told the officers that he had left for Colombia four days earlier.
To catch Doggett on his return to the United States, Driver sent word of his outstanding arrest warrant to all United States Customs stations and to a number of law enforcement organizations. He also placed Doggett's name in the Treasury Enforcement Communication System (TECS), a computer network that helps Customs agents screen people entering the country, and in the National Crime Information Center computer system, which serves similar ends. The TECS entry expired that September, however, and Doggett's name vanished from the system.
In September 1981, Driver found out that Doggett was under arrest on drug charges in Panama and, thinking that a formal extradition request would be futile, simply asked Panama to "expel" Doggett to the United States. Although the Panamanian authorities promised to comply when their own proceedings had run their course, they freed Doggett the following July and let him go to Colombia, where he stayed with an aunt for several months. On September 25, 1982, he passed unhindered through Customs in New York City and settled down in Virginia. Since his return to the United States, he has married, earned a college degree, found a steady job as a computer operations manager, lived openly under his own name, and stayed within the law.
ture for Colombia. Driver then simply assumed Doggett had settled there, and he made no effort to find out for sure or to track Doggett down, either abroad or in the United States. Thus Doggett remained lost to the American criminal justice system until September 1988, when the Marshal's Service ran a simple credit check on several thousand people subject to outstanding arrest warrants and, within minutes, found out where Doggett lived and worked. On September 5, 1988, nearly 6 years after his return to the United States and 81/2 years after his indictment, Doggett was arrested.
He naturally moved to dismiss the indictment, arguing that the Government's failure to prosecute him earlier violated his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial. The Federal Magistrate hearing his motion applied the criteria for assessing speedy trial claims set out in Barker v. Wingo, 407 U. S. 514 (1972): "[l]ength of delay, the reason for the delay, the defendant's assertion of his right, and prejudice to the defendant." Id., at 530 (footnote omitted). The Magistrate found that the delay between Doggett's indictment and arrest was long enough to be "presumptively prejudicial," Magistrate's Report, reprinted at App. to Pet. for Cert. 2728, that the delay "clearly [was] attributable to the negligence of the government," id., at 39, and that Doggett could not be faulted for any delay in asserting his right to a speedy trial, there being no evidence that he had known of the charges against him until his arrest, id., at 42-44. The Magistrate also found, however, that Doggett had made no affirmative showing that the delay had impaired his ability to mount a successful defense or had otherwise prejudiced him. In his recommendation to the District Court, the Magistrate contended that this failure to demonstrate particular prejudice sufficed to defeat Doggett's speedy trial claim.
expressly reserving the right to appeal his ensuing conviction on the speedy trial claim.
A split panel of the Court of Appeals affirmed. 906 F.2d 573 (CAll 1990). Following Circuit precedent, see Ringstaff v. Howard, 885 F.2d 1542 (CAll 1989) (en bane), the court ruled that Doggett could prevail only by proving "actual prejudice" or by establishing that "the first three Barker factors weigh[ed] heavily in his favor." 906 F. 2d, at 582. The majority agreed with the Magistrate that Doggett had not shown actual prejudice, and, attributing the Government's delay to "negligence" rather than "bad faith," id., at 578-579, it concluded that Barker's first three factors did not weigh so heavily against the Government as to make proof of specific prejudice unnecessary. Judge Clark dissented, arguing, among other things, that the majority had placed undue emphasis on Doggett's inability to prove actual prejudice.
We granted Doggett's petition for certiorari, 498 U. S. 1119 (1991), and now reverse.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees that, "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy ... trial .... " On its face, the Speedy Trial Clause is written with such breadth that, taken literally, it would forbid the government to delay the trial of an "accused" for any reason at all. Our cases, however, have qualified the literal sweep of the provision by specifically recognizing the relevance of four separate enquiries: whether delay before trial was uncommonly long, whether the government or the criminal defendant is more to blame for that delay, whether, in due course, the defendant asserted his right to a speedy trial, and whether he suffered prejudice as the delay's result. See Barker, supra, at 530.
threshold dividing ordinary from "presumptively prejudicial" delay, 407 U. S., at 530-531, since, by definition, he cannot complain that the government has denied him a "speedy" trial if it has, in fact, prosecuted his case with customary promptness. If the accused makes this showing, the court must then consider, as one factor among several, the extent to which the delay stretches beyond the bare minimum needed to trigger judicial examination of the claim. See id., at 533-534. This latter enquiry is significant to the speedy trial analysis because, as we discuss below, the presumption that pretrial delay has prejudiced the accused intensifies over time. In this case, the extraordinary 81h-year lag between Doggett's indictment and arrest clearly suffices to trigger the speedy trial enquiry; 1 its further significance within that enquiry will be dealt with later.
1 Depending on the nature of the charges, the lower courts have generally found postaccusation delay "presumptively prejudicial" at least as it approaches one year. See 2 W. LaFave & J. Israel, Criminal Procedure § 18.2, p. 405 (1984); Joseph, Speedy Trial Rights in Application, 48 Ford. L. Rev. 611, 623, n. 71 (1980) (citing cases). We note that, as the term is used in this threshold context, "presumptive prejudice" does not necessarily indicate a statistical probability of prejudice; it simply marks the point at which courts deem the delay unreasonable enough to trigger the Barker enquiry. Cf. Uviller, Barker v. Wingo: Speedy Trial Gets a Fast Shuffle, 72 Colum. L. Rev. 1376, 1384-1385 (1972).
was living abroad, and, had they done so, they could have found him within minutes. While the Government's lethargy may have reflected no more than Doggett's relative unimportance in the world of drug trafficking, it was still findable negligence, and the finding stands.
"no information that Doggett was aware of the indictment before he left the United States in March 1980, or prior to his arrest. His mother testified at the suppression hearing that she never told him, and Barnes and Riddle [Doggett's confederates] state they did not have contact with him after their arrest [in 1980]." 2 Record, Exh. 63, p. 2.
Doggett's ignorance. Thus, Doggett is not to be taxed for invoking his speedy trial right only after his arrest.
The Government is left, then, with its principal contention: that Doggett fails to make out a successful speedy trial claim because he has not shown precisely how he was prejudiced by the delay between his indictment and trial.
We have observed in prior cases that unreasonable delay between formal accusation and trial threatens to produce more than one sort of harm, including "oppressive pretrial incarceration," "anxiety and concern of the accused," and "the possibility that the [accused's] defense will be impaired" by dimming memories and loss of exculpatory evidence. Barker, 407 U. S., at 532; see also Smith v. Hooey, 393 U. S. 374,377-379 (1969); United States v. Ewell, 383 U. S. 116, 120 (1966). Of these forms of prejudice, "the most serious is the last, because the inability of a defendant adequately to prepare his case skews the fairness of the entire system." 407 U. S., at 532. Doggett claims this kind of prejudice, and there is probably no other kind that he can claim, since he was subjected neither to pretrial detention nor, he has successfully contended, to awareness of unresolved charges against him.
based on textual and historical grounds, see Marion, supra, at 313-320, that the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to a speedy trial has no application beyond the confines of a formal criminal prosecution. Once triggered by arrest, indictment, or other official accusation, however, the speedy trial enquiry must weigh the effect of delay on the accused's defense just as it has to weigh any other form of prejudice that Barker recognized.2 See Moore v. Arizona, 414 U. S. 25, 26-27, and n. 2 (1973); Barker, supra, at 532; Smith, supra, at 377-379; Ewell, supra, at 120.
2 Thus, we reject the Government's argument that the effect of delay on adjudicative accuracy is exclusively a matter for consideration under the Due Process Clause. We leave intact our earlier observation, see United States v. MacDonald, 456 U. S. 1, 7 (1982), that a defendant may invoke due process to challenge delay both before and after official accusation.
such presumptive prejudice cannot alone carry a Sixth Amendment claim without regard to the other Barker criteria, see Loud Hawk, supra, at 315, it is part of the mix of relevant facts, and its importance increases with the length of delay.
This brings us to an enquiry into the role that presumptive prejudice should play in the disposition of Doggett's speedy trial claim. We begin with hypothetical and somewhat easier cases and work our way to this one.
Our speedy trial standards recognize that pretrial delay is often both inevitable and wholly justifiable. The government may need time to collect witnesses against the accused, oppose his pretrial motions, or, if he goes into hiding, track him down. We attach great weight to such considerations when balancing them against the costs of going forward with a trial whose probative accuracy the passage of time has begun by degrees to throw into question. See Loud Hawk, supra, at 315-317. Thus, in this case, if the Government had pursued Doggett with reasonable diligence from his indictment to his arrest, his speedy trial claim would fail. Indeed, that conclusion would generally follow as a matter of course however great the delay, so long as Doggett could not show specific prejudice to his defense.
The Government concedes, on the other hand, that Doggett would prevail if he could show that the Government had intentionally held back in its prosecution of him to gain some impermissible advantage at trial. See Brief for United States 28, n. 21; Tr. of Oral Arg. 28-34 (Feb. 24, 1992). That we cannot doubt. Barker stressed that official bad faith in causing delay will be weighed heavily against the government, 407 U. S., at 531, and a bad-faith delay the length of this negligent one would present an overwhelming case for dismissal.
dIe ground. While not compelling relief in every case where bad-faith delay would make relief virtually automatic, neither is negligence automatically tolerable simply because the accused cannot demonstrate exactly how it has prejudiced him. I t was on this point that the Court of Appeals erred, and on the facts before us, it was reversible error.
Barker made it clear that "different weights [are to be] assigned to different reasons" for delay. Ibid. Although negligence is obviously to be weighed more lightly than a deliberate intent to harm the accused's defense, it still falls on the wrong side of the divide between acceptable and unacceptable reasons for delaying a criminal prosecution once it has begun. And such is the nature of the prejudice presumed that the weight we assign to official negligence compounds over time as the presumption of evidentiary prejudice grows. Thus, our toleration of such negligence varies inversely with its protractedness, cf. Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U. S. 51 (1988), and its consequent threat to the fairness of the accused's trial. Condoning prolonged and unjustifiable delays in prosecution would both penalize many defendants for the state's fault and simply encourage the government to gamble with the interests of criminal suspects assigned a low prosecutorial priority. The Government, indeed, can hardly complain too loudly, for persistent neglect in concluding a criminal prosecution indicates an uncommonly feeble interest in bringing an accused to justice; the more weight the Government attaches to securing a conviction, the harder it will try to get it.
delay attributable to the Government's negligence far exceeds the threshold needed to state a speedy trial claim; indeed, we have called shorter delays "extraordinary." See Barker, supra, at 533. When the Government's negligence thus causes delay six times as long as that generally sufficient to trigger judicial review, see n. 1, supra, and when the presumption of prejudice, albeit unspecified, is neither extenuated,3 as by the defendant's acquiescence, e. g., 407 U. S., at 534-536, nor persuasively rebutted,4 the defendant is entitled to relief.
3 Citing United States v. Broce, 488 U. S. 563, 569 (1989), the Government argues that, by pleading guilty, Doggett waived any right to claim that the delay would have prejudiced him had he gone to trial. Brief for United States 30. Yet Doggett did not sign a guilty plea simpliciter, but a conditional guilty plea under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(a)(2), thereby securing the Government's explicit consent to his reservation of "the right to appeal the adverse Court ruling on his Motion to Dismiss for violation of Constitutional Speedy Trial provisions based upon post-indictment delay." Plea Agreement, 2 Record, Exh. 66, p. 1. One cannot reasonably construe this agreement to bar Doggett from pursuing as effective an appeal as he could have raised had he not pleaded guilty.
4 While the Government ably counters Doggett's efforts to demonstrate particularized trial prejudice, it has not, and probably could not have, affirmatively proved that the delay left his ability to defend himself unimpaired. Cf. Uviller, 72 Colum. L. Rev., at 1394-1395.
of time was potential prejudice to his ability to defend his case. We have not allowed such speculative harm to tip the scales. Instead, we have required a showing of actual prejudice to the defense before weighing it in the balance. As we stated in United States v. Loud Hawk, 474 U. S. 302, 315 (1986), the "possibility of prejudice is not sufficient to support respondents' position that their speedy trial rights were violated. In this case, moreover, delay is a two-edged sword. It is the Government that bears the burden of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The passage of time may make it difficult or impossible for the Government to carry this burden." The Court of Appeals followed this holding, and I believe we should as well. For this reason, I respectfully dissent.
Just as "bad facts make bad law," so too odd facts make odd law. Doggett's 81h-year odyssey from youthful drug dealing in the tobacco country of North Carolina, through stints in a Panamanian jail and in Colombia, to life as a computer operations manager, homeowner, and registered voter in suburban Virginia is extraordinary. But even more extraordinary is the Court's conclusion that the Government denied Doggett his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial despite the fact that he has suffered none of the harms that the right was designed to prevent. I respectfully dissent.
neither in United States custody nor subject to bail during the entire 81h-year period at issue. Indeed, as this case comes to us, we must assume that he was blissfully unaware of his indictment all the while, and thus was not subject to the anxiety or humiliation that typically accompanies a known criminal charge.
I disagree with the Court's analysis. In my view, the Sixth Amendment's speedy trial guarantee does not provide independent protection against either prejudice to an accused's defense or the disruption of his life. I shall consider each in turn.
1 See 502 U. S. 976 (1991) (directing the parties to brief the question "whether the history of the Speedy Trial Clause of the Sixth Amendment supports the view that the Clause protects a right of citizens to repose, free from the fear of secret or unknown indictments for past crimes, independent of any interest in preventing lengthy pretrial incarceration or prejudice to the case of a criminal defendant").
protect a defendant from all effects flowing from a delay before trial." Id., at 311. The Clause is directed not generally against delay-related prejudice, but against delayrelated prejudice to a defendant's liberty. "The speedy trial guarantee is designed to minimize the possibility of lengthy incarceration prior to trial, to reduce the lesser, but nevertheless substantial, impairment of liberty imposed on an accused while released on bail, and to shorten the disruption of life caused by arrest and the presence of unresolved criminal charges." United States v. MacDonald, 456 U. S. 1,8 (1982). Thus, "when defendants are not incarcerated or subjected to other substantial restrictions on their liberty, a court should not weigh that time towards a claim under the Speedy Trial Clause." Loud Hawk, supra, at 312.
A lengthy pretrial delay, of course, may prejudice an accused's ability to defend himself. But, we have explained, prejudice to the defense is not the sort of impairment of liberty against which the Clause is directed. "Passage of time, whether before or after arrest, may impair memories, cause evidence to be lost, deprive the defendant of witnesses, and otherwise interfere with his ability to defend himself. But this possibility of prejudice at trial is not itself sufficient reason to wrench the Sixth Amendment from its proper context." Marion, supra, at 321-322 (footnote omitted; emphasis added). Even though a defendant may be prejudiced by a pretrial delay, and even though the government may be unable to provide a valid justification for that delay, the Clause does not come into play unless the delay impairs the defendant's liberty. "Inordinate delay ... may impair a defendant's ability to present an effective defense. But the major evils protected against by the speedy trial guarantee exist quite apart from actual or possible prejudice to an accused's defense." 404 U. S., at 320 (emphasis added).
Clause. In particular, in Barker v. Wingo, 407 U. S. 514, 532 (1972), we asserted that the Clause was "designed to protect" three basic interests: "(i) to prevent oppressive pretrial incarceration; (ii) to minimize anxiety and concern of the accused; and (iii) to limit the possibility that the defense will be impaired." See also Smith v. Hooey, 393 U. S. 374, 377-378 (1969); United States v. Ewell, 383 U. S. 116, 120 (1966). Indeed, the Barker Court went so far as to declare that of these three interests, "the most serious is the last, because the inability of a defendant adequately to prepare his case skews the fairness of the entire system." 407 U. S., at 532.
We are thus confronted with two conflicting lines of authority, the one declaring that "limit[ing] the possibility that the defense will be impaired" is an independent and fundamental objective of the Speedy Trial Clause, e. g., Barker, supra, at 532, and the other declaring that it is not, e. g., Marion, 404 U. S. 307 (1971); MacDonald, supra; Loud Hawk, supra. The Court refuses to acknowledge this conflict. Instead, it simply reiterates the relevant language from Barker and asserts that Marion, MacDonald, and Loud Hawk "support nothing beyond the principle ... that the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to a speedy trial has no application beyond the confines of a formal criminal prosecution." Ante, at 654-655. That attempt at reconciliation is eminently unpersuasive.
deed aimed at safeguarding against prejudice to the defense, then it would presumably limit all prosecutions that occur long after the criminal events at issue. A defendant prosecuted 10 years after a crime is just as hampered in his ability to defend himself whether he was indicted the week after the crime or the week before the trial-but no one would suggest that the Clause protects him in the latter situation, where the delay did not substantially impair his liberty, either through oppressive incarceration or the anxiety of known criminal charges. Thus, while the Court is correct to observe that the defendants in Marion, MacDonald, and Loud Hawk were not subject to formal criminal prosecution during the lengthy period of delay prior to their trials, that observation misses the point of those cases. With respect to the relevant consideration-the defendants' ability to defend themselves despite the passage of time-they were in precisely the same situation as a defendant who had long since been indicted. The initiation of a formal criminal prosecution is simply irrelevant to whether the defense has been prejudiced by delay.
plains why the lower courts consistently have held that, with respect to sealed (and hence secret) indictments, the protections of the Speedy Trial Clause are triggered not when the indictment is filed, but when it is unsealed. See, e. g., United States v. Watson, 599 F.2d 1149, 1156-1157, and n. 5 (CA2 1979), modified on other grounds sub nom. United States v. Muse, 633 F.2d 1041 (CA2 1980) (en bane); United States v. Hay, 527 F.2d 990, 994, and n. 4 (CAlO 1975); cf. United States v. Lewis, 907 F.2d 773, 774, n. 3 (CA8 1990).
It is misleading, then, for the Court to accuse the Government of "ask[ing] us, in effect, to read part of Barker right out of the law," ante, at 654, a course the Court resolutely rejects. For the issue here is not simply whether the relevant language from Barker should be read out of the law, but whether that language trumps the contrary logic of Marion, MacDonald, and Loud Hawk. The Court's protestations notwithstanding, the two lines of authority cannot be reconciled; to reaffirm the one is to undercut the other.
other words, for purposes of the right to counsel, an "accused" must in fact be accused of a crime; unlike the speedy trial right, it does not attach upon arrest. See, e. g., Gouveia, supra, at 189-190; McNeil v. Wisconsin, 501 U. S. 171, 175-176 (1991).
3 Our summary reversal in Moore v. Arizona, 414 U. S. 25 (1973) (per curiam), is not to the contrary. The petitioner there was tried for murder in Arizona "[a]lmost three years after he was charged and 28 months after he first demanded that Arizona either extradite him from California, where he was serving a prison term, or drop a detainer against him." Ibid. The Arizona Supreme Court denied him speedy trial relief on the ground that "a showing of prejudice to the defense at trial was essential to establish a federal speedy trial claim." Ibid. We rejected that reasoning, emphasizing the contextual nature of the speedy trial analysis set forth in Barker v. Wingo, 407 U. S. 514 (1972).
To hold that a speedy trial claim can succeed without a showing of actual trial prejudice is not, of course, to hold that such a claim can succeed without a showing of any prejudice at all. Moore, like Barker, is clearly premised on the assumption that the defendant invoking the protection of the Speedy Trial Clause has been subjected to the evils against which the Clause was designed to protect. Indeed, Moore makes this assumption quite explicit, observing that prejudice is "'inevitably present in every case to some extent,jor every defendant will either be incarcerated pending trial or on bail subject to substantial restrictions on his liberty.''' Moore, supra, at 27 (quoting Barker, supra, at 537 (WHITE, J., concurring)) (emphasis added). While accurate in the vast majority of cases, that observation is not inevitably true-as this case shows.
courts on an ad hoc basis, they "provide predictability by specifying a limit beyond which there is an irrebuttable presumption that a defendant's right to a fair trial would be prejudiced." 404 U. S., at 322.
4 The result in the case may well be explained by an improvident concession. While the United States argued essentially that a defendant's speedy trial rights cannot be violated where he is neither incarcerated nor subject to the anxiety of known criminal charges, it did not claim that this was invariably so. Instead, the United States conceded that a defendant whose liberty was in no way impaired by a pretrial delay could nevertheless succeed in a speedy trial claim if the government had intentionally caused the delay for the specific purpose of prejudicing the defense or injuring the defendant in some other significant way. The defendant in this case is not entitled to relief, the United States asserts, because the delay in bringing him to trial was, at worst, caused by negligence.
Therefore, I see no basis for the Court's conclusion that Doggett is entitled to relief under the Speedy Trial Clause simply because the Government was negligent in prosecuting him and because the resulting delay may have prejudiced his defense.
It remains to be considered, however, whether Doggett is entitled to relief under the Speedy Trial Clause because of the disruption of his life years after the criminal events at issue. In other words, does the Clause protect a right to repose, free from secret or unknown indictments? In my view, it does not, for much the same reasons set forth above.
one hand, and bad-faith conduct, on the other. As noted in text, the Due Process Clause is the proper recourse for an accused whose defense is materially prejudiced by bad-faith governmental behavior. See United States v. Lovasco, 431 U. S. 783 (1977); cf. Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U. S. 51 (1988).
The Court, thus, is certainly entitled to decide this particular case adversely to the United States on the ground that the concession undercut the Government's entire argument. But the Court goes much further. It affirmatively endorses the point conceded, thereby embedding in the law the mischievous notion that a defendant is entitled to the protection of the Speedy Trial Clause even though he has suffered none of the harms against which the Clause protects, as long as the government's conduct is sufficiently culpable. I would disregard the concession, for much the same reasons that we sometimes consider an argument that a litigant has waived. See, e. g., Arcadia v. Ohio Power Co., 498 U. S. 73, 77 (1990); Kamen v. Kemper Financial Services, Inc., 500 U. S. 90, 99-100 (1991); United States v. Burke, 504 U. S. 229, 246 (1992) (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment). I see little sense in elevating an unwise concession into unwise law.
tice § 316, p. 209 (8th ed. 1880) ("While ... courts look with disfavor on prosecutions that have been unduly delayed, there is, at common law, no absolute limitation which prevents the prosecution of offences after a specified time has arrived") (footnote omitted); 1 H. Wood, Limitation of Actions § 28, p. 117 (4th ed. 1916) ("At common law there is no limitation to criminal proceedings by indictment").
That is not to deny that our legal system has long recognized the value of repose, both to the individual and to society. But that recognition finds expression not in the sweeping commands of the Constitution, or in the common law, but in any number of specific statutes of limitations enacted by the federal and state legislatures. Such statutes not only protect a defendant from prejudice to his defense (as discussed above), but also balance his interest in repose against society's interest in the apprehension and punishment of criminals. Cf. Toussie v. United States, 397 U. S. 112, 114115 (1970). In general, the graver the offense, the longer the limitations period; indeed, many serious offenses, such as murder, typically carry no limitations period at all. See, e. g., Note, The Statute of Limitations in Criminal Law: A Penetrable Barrier to Prosecution, 102 U. Pa. L. Rev. 630, 652-653 (1954) (comparing state statutes of limitations for various crimes); Uelmen, Making Sense out of the California Criminal Statute of Limitations, 15 Pac. L. J. 35, 76-79 (1983) (same). These statutes refute the notion that our society ever has recognized any general right of criminals to repose.
illuminate the protections of the Speedy Trial Clause, not to take the measure of one man's life.
There is no basis for concluding that the disruption of an accused's life years after the commission of his alleged crime is an evil independently protected by the Speedy Trial Clause. Such disruption occurs regardless of whether the individual is under indictment during the period of delay. Thus, had Doggett been indicted shortly before his 1988 arrest rather than shortly after his 1980 crime, his repose would have been equally shattered-but he would not have even a colorable speedy trial claim. To recognize a constitutional right to repose is to recognize a right to be tried speedily after the offense. That would, of course, convert the Speedy Trial Clause into a constitutional statute of limitations-a result with no basis in the text or history of the Clause or in our precedents.
Our constitutional law has become ever more complex in recent decades. That is, in itself, a regrettable development, for the law draws force from the clarity of its command and the certainty of its application. As the complexity of legal doctrines increases, moreover, so too does the danger that their foundational principles will become obscured. I fear that danger has been realized here. So engrossed is the Court in applying the multifactor balancing test set forth in Barker that it loses sight of the nature and purpose of the speedy trial guarantee set forth in the Sixth Amendment. The Court's error, in my view, lies not so much in its particular application of the Barker test to the facts of this case, but more fundamentally in its failure to recognize that the speedy trial guarantee cannot be violated-and thus Barker does not apply at all-when an accused is entirely unaware of a pending indictment against him.
5 To recognize that neither of these considerations provides an independent ground for speedy trial relief, of course, is not to say that neither of them is relevant to speedy trial analysis. Both may be appropriate considerations in the highly contextual inquiry whether a defendant who has been deprived of a liberty protected by the Clause is entitled to relief. See Barker, 407 U. S., at 530-533.
6 It is quite likely, in fact, that the delay benefited Doggett. At the time of his arrest, he had been living an apparently normal, law-abiding life for some five years-a point not lost on the District Court Judge, who, instead of imposing a prison term, sentenced him to three years' probation and a $1,000 fine. App. 114-115. Thus, the delay gave Doggett the opportunity to prove what most defendants can only promise: that he no longer posed a threat to society. There can be little doubt that, had he been tried immediately after his cocaine-importation activities, he would have received a harsher sentence.
for sloppy work or misplaced priorities, but to protect the legal rights of those individuals harmed thereby. By divorcing the Speedy Trial Clause from all considerations of prejudice to an accused, the Court positively invites the Nation's judges to indulge in ad hoc and result-driven secondguessing of the government's investigatory efforts. Our Constitution neither contemplates nor tolerates such a role. I respectfully dissent.

References: v. 
 v. 
 § 18
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 § 316
 § 28
 v.