Opinion ID: 198181
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Excludable Days

Text: 39 While September 26, 1995 must be counted, the entire period between September 27, 1995 and December 14, 1995 must be excluded from the final tally. On September 27, 1995 Barnes's codefendant moved for an extension of time to file pretrial motions. The motion was granted until October 13, 1995, and the deadline was later extended again until October 20, 1995. It is well-settled that an exclusion of time attributable to one defendant is applicable for all codefendants. See id. at 19. Therefore, this time is not counted toward the 70 days. See United States v. Jodoin, 672 F.2d 232, 237 (1st Cir.1982) (excluding time that elapsed due to defendant's request for an extension of time as directly attributable to [his] ... motion). The magistrate judge also properly excluded the period between the actual filing of the motions (October 20, 1995) and the hearing on the motions (November 13, 1995), for it falls under section 3161(h)(1)(F) as delay resulting from any pretrial motion, from the filing of the motion through the conclusion of the hearing on, ... such motion. Similarly, the magistrate judge correctly excluded the thirty days between November 14 and December 14 during which she had the initial batch of pretrial motions under advisement. See 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(J). 40 The government concedes that the 40 days between December 15 and January 23, 1996 are not excludable. We agree.
41 The excludability of the next segment of time turns on whether the government's motion to set a status conference filed on January 24, 1996 is a pretrial motion within the meaning of section 3161(h)(1)(F). Barnes argues that such a motion does not qualify as a pretrial motion because it is not of a substantive nature. For its part, the government insists that it is a pretrial motion and argues that time should be excluded from the moment the motion was filed until the date of the requested status conference. 42 We hold that a motion requesting the scheduling of a pretrial conference is a pretrial motion so as to trigger an exclusion under the Speedy Trial Act. Section 3161(h)(1)(F) states, rather expansively, that delay resulting from any pretrial motion shall be excluded. It does not distinguish between more significant or complex pretrial motions and simple or routine motions. For this reason, we have read the term pretrial motion broadly to encompass all manner of motions, ranging from informal requests for laboratory reports, see United States v. Jorge, 865 F.2d 6, 11 (1st Cir.1989), cert. denied, 490 U.S. 1027, 109 S.Ct. 1762, 104 L.Ed.2d 198 (1989), to implied requests for a new trial date, see Santiago-Becerril, 130 F.3d at 17. A motion requesting the scheduling of a status conference has undeniable pretrial significance: all kinds of matters affecting the course of trial, including discovery, motions, and trial dates may be discussed at such a conference. Cf. Fed.R.Crim.P. 17.1 ([T]he court upon motion of any party or upon its own motion may order one or more conferences to consider such matters as will promote a fair and expeditious trial.). There seems to be no good reason to exclude a motion for a status conference from the universe of possible pretrial motions. See, e.g., United States v. Bellucci, 737 F.Supp. 706, 710 (D.Mass.1990) (Tauro, D.J.) (holding that motion for status conference was pretrial motion for purposes of tolling Speedy Trial Act). Hence, in this case, the clock stopped as soon as the government filed its motion seeking a status conference on January 24, 1996. 43 The next question is how much time should be tolled. The Supreme Court has construed subsection (F) as setting forth a two-tiered approach to determining the extent of excludable delay caused by the submission and disposition of pretrial motions. See Henderson, 476 U.S. at 329-30, 106 S.Ct. 1871. For a pretrial motion on which a hearing is held, the entire period from the filing of the motion to the date of the hearing, regardless of when the hearing is scheduled, plus up to 30 additional days while the motion is under advisement is automatically excluded. See id.; Rodriguez, 63 F.3d at 1163. By contrast, when motions that require no hearing are involved, time is tolled only until the prompt disposition of the motion, which ordinarily cannot exceed the 30-day under advisement period. 3 Henderson, 476 U.S. at 329, 106 S.Ct. 1871; see Santiago-Becerril, 130 F.3d at 17; S.Rep. No. 96-212, 96th Cong., 1st Sess., at 34 (1979) ([I]f motions are so simple or routine that they do not require a hearing, necessary advisement time should be considerably less than 30 days.). A motion is deemed to be taken under advisement when  'the court receives all the papers it reasonably expects.'  Rodriguez, 63 F.3d at 1163 (quoting Henderson, 476 U.S. at 329, 106 S.Ct. 1871). 44 Because a motion requesting only the scheduling of a status conference requires no hearing--marked by oral argument, factual findings, or legal rulings--but involves merely the simple administrative act of setting a date, it must be resolved within 30 days of the date the Court has received all it expects to properly consider the request. See Rodriguez, 63 F.3d at 1165-66; United States v. Ferris, 751 F.2d 436, 440 (1st Cir.1984); 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(J). It follows that such a motion is resolved as soon as the conference is actually scheduled--not when the various matters for possible discussion, in fact, are broached--and that the clock will start again the following day. The government disagrees, arguing that the clock should be tolled until the actual date of the conference, which it calls a hearing; but to adopt this reasoning would contravene the language of the Act. Because the setting of the date resolves the motion in its entirety, the conference cannot possibly represent a hearing on ... such motion. 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(F). 45 In United States v. Staula, 80 F.3d 596 (1st Cir.1996), we held that a hearing is any on-the-record colloquy in which the district court hears the arguments of counsel and considers those arguments prior to deciding a pending motion. Id. at 602. Our reasoning today is entirely consistent with that decision. Once a conference has been set down on a court's calendar, there is no longer any pending motion to decide. The motion seeking a status conference has already been resolved. 46 Needless to say, there are varieties of motions that may or may not require a hearing. But we need not wander too deeply into this thicket today, for we hold only that motions seeking nothing more than the scheduling of a conference must be acted upon within 30 days. In doing so, we emphasize that, consistent with the letter and spirit of the Speedy Trial Act, relatively simple motions should be disposed of expeditiously or the clock will resume ticking. 47 Applying the foregoing principles to the present facts, we find that the clock was tolled from January 24 until January 31, 1996. The clock ran for the next six days and stopped again on February 7, 1996, when Reynaldo Barnes moved to adjourn the conference. Although the court made no express findings in granting the motion, the letter motion itself makes clear that Reynaldo Barnes's counsel was unavailable until at least the first of March due to conflicts with his work and personal schedules. Thus, the court's decision to grant the continuance comports with the requirements of section 3161(h)(8)(A). See United States v. Rush, 738 F.2d 497, 507 (1st Cir.1984) ([I]t is not necessary for the court to articulate the basic facts when they are obvious and set forth in a motion for a continuance.), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1004, 105 S.Ct. 1355, 84 L.Ed.2d 378 (1985). The clock resumed on March 5, 1996, the day after the conference. The clock temporarily stopped again on March 18 due to defendants' two overlapping requests to postpone the trial, and remained stopped until October 8, 1996. 48 At this point, 61 nonexcludable days had already accrued. 49
50 This case turns on the period starting with the October 8, 1996 trial date. Frankly, we, like the attorneys for both sides, are confused as to the exact circumstances surrounding the adjournment of the October 7, 1996 trial date. It is a mystery. Neither the government nor any of the defendants formally moved for a continuance, although it is theoretically possible that someone so moved informally. One would, however, usually expect one party to accuse the other of requesting a continuance if an informal request had been made by one of the lawyers; but no illuminating bout of finger-pointing has erupted. This suggests that the court, on its own volition, ordered the adjournment without date. 4 The government contends that the trial was adjourned upon consent of defendant, but the record reflects no such consent. To accept the government's position therefore requires us to infer from silence that defendant's consent was given. This we cannot do. What is apparent is that even assuming a trial date was set for October 7 and then continued by the court without objection, the grant of such a continuance--of which there is no contemporaneous written or oral record--fails to comply with the Act. See Amended Speedy Trial Act Guidelines, Aug. 28, 1981, reprinted in Robert L. Misner, Speedy Trial Federal and State Practice, App. B, at 775 (The fact that the defendant has requested the continuance or consents to it is not in itself sufficient to toll the operation of the time limits.). Whether time resulting from a continuance may toll the Act depends on whether the court abused its discretion by granting the continuance. See Pringle, 751 F.2d at 432. 51 We find that the court should not have adjourned the trial date in the manner that it did. A trial court's discretion to invoke the ends of justice exception by granting a continuance is exceedingly narrow, and should not be done lightly or routinely. United States v. Mitchell, 723 F.2d 1040, 1044 (1st Cir.1983). 52 While a continuance may have been entirely justified under the circumstances, the court failed to set forth in the record of the case ... its reasons for finding that the ends of justice served by the granting of such continuance outweigh the best interest of the public and defendant in a speedy trial. 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(8)(A). There is simply no record of the continuance. Although we have held that there is no need to articulate the basic facts critical to a motion for a continuance when they are set forth in the motion papers, see Rush, 738 F.2d at 507, here, no one moved to continue the trial. Consequently, we cannot say with any reasonable certainty that the continuance met the ends of justice standard, especially where the parties themselves have offered no explanation for why or when the trial date was adjourned. The lack of findings is particularly troubling because of the open-ended nature of the continuance granted here. 5 A firm trial date was not set until the March 25, 1997 conference--more than five months after it was last continued. For these reasons, we find that the trial court abused its discretion in granting (or sua sponte ordering) the continuance, and the resulting delay of 56 days must be counted against the speedy trial clock.
53 In an effort to defeat the operation of the Act, the government argues that the entire period of time from October 7, 1996 onward must be excluded because Barnes waived her right to a speedy trial. The government maintains that Barnes's June 6, 1996 waiver impermissibly lulled it and the district court to sleep. We reject the government's theory of an unlimited waiver. 54 Defendants generally may not elect to waive the protections of the Act. The reason is that the public has at least as great an interest as the defendant in an expeditious criminal trial. See United States v. Hastings, 847 F.2d 920, 923 (1st Cir.) (noting that society has a general interest in resolving the guilt or innocence of those accused of crime rapidly (consistent with fundamental fairness) and punishing those found to be guilty), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 925, 109 S.Ct. 308, 102 L.Ed.2d 327 (1988). 55 In United States v. Pringle, 751 F.2d 419 (1st Cir.1984), we crafted a limited unclean hands exception to this rule. Cf. United States v. Gambino, 59 F.3d 353, 360 (2d Cir.1995) ([T]hose courts recognizing the [Pringle ] exception have placed tight restrictions on the finding of waiver.), cert. denied, 517 U.S. 1187, 116 S.Ct. 1671, 134 L.Ed.2d 776 (1996). In Pringle, defendants had sought to continue the trial, declaring that all defendants waive[d] their rights to a speedy trial. 751 F.2d at 433. Defendants later moved to dismiss the indictment based on the delay that ensued in selecting a new trial date. The district court denied the motion. We affirmed, holding, inter alia, that although a defendant cannot waive the right to speedy trial, he or she cannot lull[ ] the court and prosecution into a false sense of security only to turn around later and use the waiver-induced leisurely pace of the case as grounds for dismissal. Id. at 434. 56 The government here asserts that defendants' June 6, 1996 waiver was indefinite in scope, tolling the clock up to and including the first date of trial in May 1997. 6 Relying on Pringle, the government argues that the waiver provided by defendants caused the delay by misleading the government and the court into believing that any date would be acceptable to them. While any waiver would technically be inoperative, if the government is correct about the nature of the waiver, the delay that resulted from the waiver would be excludable under Pringle. 57 We are not persuaded that the Pringle exception applies to the extent suggested by the government. While defendants' waiver definitely contributed to a delay until October 7, Barnes cannot be held responsible for the delay that occurred after trial was initially set for that date and then subsequently continued. We reach this conclusion for several reasons. 58 First, defendants did not offer an open-ended waiver. Unlike the sweeping language contained in defendants' waiver in Pringle, the waiver at issue does not represent defendants' consent to an indefinite exclusion of time, but authorized time to be excluded only until the date set for the new trial in the fall of 1996. By its terms, the document did not waive Barnes's speedy trial rights indefinitely. 59 Second, even if there was any ambiguity as to the scope of the waiver, the extraneous evidence conclusively puts that doubt to rest in Barnes's favor. The waiver closely followed and was inextricably bound up with Barnes's request for an adjournment until late September or early October. Thus, read together with her motion to continue, the waiver put the district court and the government on notice that Barnes desired a trial by October 1996. 60 Third, no one was lull[ed] to sleep by the waiver. The joint motion for a status conference later drafted by the government proves this. In the motion, the parties purportedly sought an exclusion of time from the date of an entry of an Order on defendant's pre-trial motions until such date as this Court sets for trial. (A.37). But if the government had truly believed that Barnes had already provided an open-ended waiver on June 6, 1996, such a broad and seemingly retroactive exclusion of time would have been unnecessary. The government's own actions therefore suggest that the government itself believed that there might still be a speedy trial problem even after defendants signed the waiver. 61 In addition, the trial court acted on defendants' motions (including the waiver) by continuing the trial only until October 7, 1996, showing that it, too, understood that Barnes wished to be tried by October 1996. The date set by the court stood at the very end of the spectrum of Barnes's waiver. At best, Barnes may be said to have consented to and caused the delay throughout the fall of 1996, tolling the clock under Pringle until early October, but certainly no later. In other words, the limited waiver did not create the delay[ ] that transpired when the date was adjourned from October 7. Id. at 434. 62 Nothing in the record even remotely suggests that Barnes strategically attempted to sandbag anyone. Instead, the record shows that she made clear to the court and prosecution that she desired to be tried in the fall of 1996, at the latest by early October. That did not happen. The reasons for this delay have not been made clear by the guardians of the speedy trial clock: the court, and to a lesser extent, the government. Whether the continuance was justified and the court neglected to make the necessary ends of justice findings or the government simply lost track of the days makes no difference. The unexplained delay occurred; it must be accounted for. 63 If Barnes is guilty of anything during this crucial time frame, it is that she did not object earlier. But her mere failure to object to a delay does not constitute work[ing] both sides of the street, Pringle, 751 F.2d at 434, and it does not excuse the trial court's failure to make explicit findings as to why a continuance best served the interests of justice. To hold otherwise would be to permit the finding of a waiver whenever a defendant fails to object to a continuance. Such a conclusion would turn the Act on its head by shifting the burden of enforcing the Act to the defendant.
64 Although the Speedy Trial Act was violated as early as October 16, 1996, we press on with our analysis to discern the full extent of the unexcused trial delay. Because the continuance was defective, the clock continued to run unabated until December 3, 1996, the date the government filed the joint motion seeking the scheduling of a conference for the purpose of setting a firm trial date and an exclusion of time. 65 The motion for a status conference was considered to be under advisement on December 10, 1996, the date Barnes filed her opposition to the request to exclude time. Hence, the 30-day period from December 11, 1996 through January 9, 1997 is excluded. But the trial court did not act on this motion until March 7, 1997, long after this 30-day window had shut, and [w]e see no reason why the pretrial conference could not have been scheduled sooner than it was. Mitchell, 723 F.2d at 1048. Accordingly, January 10, 1997 through March 24, 1997, the additional 74 days that accrued before the court actually resolved the motion, must count on the clock. 66 The government also contends that terms of the so-called joint motion for a status conference warrant excluding the time from December 3, 1996 onward. The problem with this argument is that the court never actually excluded any time based on this motion. It simply set a date for a conference months later, either ignoring or implicitly rejecting the request to exclude time. Given the hotly-disputed nature of the request, including whether Barnes had given her consent to make it, we cannot say that the court erred by refusing to exclude time. For this reason, the motion does not toll the Act for more than the 30 days during which it should have been decided. 67 Moving forward, we find that the 56 days between March 25, 1997 and May 19, 1997 must be excluded. At the March 25 conference, Reynaldo Barnes moved to change his plea, and the court accepted his guilty plea at a hearing on May 15, 1997. The intervening time is not counted, for all of the days between the date a codefendant files a motion for a change of plea and the date of the change of plea hearing itself are excludable from the [Act]'s seventy-day time limit. Santiago-Becerril, 130 F.3d at 20. Moreover, the overlapping adjournment sought by Barnes covers the period from April 4, 1997 until the first day of trial. It goes without saying that the government's in limine motion filed May 16, 1997 also tolled the clock until the motion was resolved on the first day of trial. 68 To summarize, we find that 191 days of nonexcludable time elapsed between Barnes's first appearance before the magistrate judge in the District of Massachusetts and the first day of trial. Forty-one days passed by the time of defendant's first conference before the district court; 20 days elapsed between February 1 and October 8, 1996; 56 days passed between the October 8, 1996 trial date and the filing of the joint motion requesting a conference on December 3, 1996; and 74 days of unexcused time elapsed while the motion requesting a pretrial conference was pending (excluding the 30-day under-advisement period). The 70-day limit was clearly exceeded. The indictment should have been dismissed.