Court Opinion

ID: 9471704
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:39:24.717088+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:32.764005
License: Public Domain

NORRIS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree with' the majority that a district court need not set forth its findings at the same time it grants a continuance under the Speedy Trial Act. I disagree, however, with the majority’s conclusion that the findings that were set forth in this case are adequate to support such a continuance.
The majority essentially relies on three findings. First, the majority points out that the case involved 135 pre-trial motions. Yet the amount of time required to dispose of such motions is automatically excluded under the Speedy Trial Act from the seventy-day deadline. 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(F). The delay resulting from the motions thus cannot also make the case more complex within the meaning of the Act.
Second, the majority notes that the case originally involved five defendants. But Congress cannot have intended the presence of multiple defendants, by itself, to constitute complexity. Otherwise, the statute would not have been drafted to include cases with this number of defendants.
Third, the majority emphasizes that more defendants were added to the case as it progressed and that some óf these defendants were not immediately arraigned. But no additional defendants were indicted by July 15, 1981 — the time when the seventy-day period expired for defendant Bryant. The complexity that the presence of other defendants created later in the case does not support a continuance granted earlier in the case.
By affirming the district court’s judgment, the majority implicitly adopts a standard that would allow lower courts to find complexity in practically every case. This result undermines the determination by Congress, embodied in the Speedy Trial Act, that it is presumptively unfair to a criminal defendant to delay his trial for more than seventy days.