Criminal Law in Bergen and Passaic Counties: The Right to a Speedy Trial (Part 2)

The United States Supreme Court has recognized the "impossibility" of determining, with precision, when an accused's right to a speedy trial has been denied when it observed: "[w]e find no constitutional basis for holding that the speedy trial right can be quantified into a specified number of days months." Thus, a delay of five years was held not to violate a defendant's speedy trial right, while a delay of a mere ten months was determined to be a deprivation of a defendant's speedy trial right.

The courts in New Jersey have experienced a similar inability to calculate the extent of a tolerable delay in this area of the law with anything approaching mathematical exactitude. It has been said, however, that delay must be "reasonably explained and justified". Indeed, it was observed that "there comes a when delay extended for an extraordinary length of time so weights the scale ... that time becomes the decisive factor." At the very least, when the delay is "excessively long," "the burden upon defendant to satisfy the other factors is correspondingly diminished."