Court: State did not violate man’s right to speedy trial

A 21-month delay between charging and arresting an alleged perpetrator — after a nearly a decade of investigation — does not establish that a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial was violated, the Supreme Court has ruled in a 3-2 decision.

The delay fell on the defendant’s shoulders for not asserting his constitutional rights prior to his arrest, the court said. That was a more persuasive factor in the court’s analysis than the state’s “complete failure” to pursue the defendant and the state’s loss of several pieces of evidence, the opinion stated.

“[The defendant] does not even affirmatively state that he never received the summons and complaint. Nor did [he] submit any evidence or testimony from other sources that would provide any indication that he was unaware of the charges against him,” the court said.

The opinion in State v. Osorio was written by Justice G. Barry Anderson, joined by Justice David Lillehaug and Chief Justice Lorie Gildea. Justice Natalie Hudson dissented, joined by Justice David Stras. Justices Margaret Chutich and Anne McKeig did not participate.

The court upheld the Court of Appeals, which had reversed a Hennepin County District Court judge who dismissed the case.

Investigation in limbo

According to court documents, the Mound Police Department opened its investigation back in 2007 when a woman reported that David Ernest Osorio had sexually abused one of her pre-teen daughters.

Not long afterward, Osorio — who remained uncharged — moved out of state to live with his mother in Perris, California. Although Mound police knew of Osorio’s whereabouts and contacted him by phone, the investigation remained in limbo until 2013, when the alleged victim’s younger sister reported that that she, too, had been assaulted by Osorio.

On May 1, 2013, Osorio was finally charged with two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, with the summons and complaint sent by mail to the Perris residence. After Osorio didn’t show up at his first court hearing, the district court issued a bench warrant.

Nonetheless, Osorio remained free for 21 months until he was arrested by Riverside Sheriff’s Department on an unrelated charge and held on the Minnesota warrant.

Sensitive balancing process

In its analysis of Osorio’s speedy-trial claim, the Supreme Court applied the four-factor test established by U.S. Supreme Court in Barker v. Wingo (1972): the length of the delay, the reason for the delay, whether the defendant asserted his right to a speedy trial, and prejudice caused by the delay.

Barker demands that the court engage in “a difficult and sensitive balancing process,” the court noted.

The court first considered the length of the delay. A speedy-trial right attaches when a person is charged or arrested and a delay may be considered presumptively prejudicial.

But in this case the court was confronted by a delay between charging the defendant and arresting him, which the U.S. Supreme Court has determined may implicate the defendant’s speedy-trial rights. The court found that the delay established presumptive prejudice but inquired further into the Barker factors.

The second Barker factor is whether the government or the defendant is more to blame for the delay. The court said that the state was responsible for the delay but that it did not intend to hamper the defense but was negligent only. That weighed against the state, but not as heavily as if the state acted intentionally.

The court also said that the defendant may have had an obligation to respond to a summons but “did not have a constitutional duty to bring himself to trial.”

Knowledge and assertion

But regardless of the state’s actions, it weighs heavily against the defendant if he knows of the charges against him but fails to assert his speedy-trial right, the court said. Weighing the totality of the evidence on the record — that the defendant was served by mail at an address he provided, that the summons was not returned and the defendant did not deny receiving it — the court said it was “reasonable to infer that the summons was properly delivered to the defendant.”

“[T]he failure of the defendant to produce any evidence or a denial are circumstances a court may consider in analyzing the entire record to determine whether a Sixth Amendment speedy-trial violation occurred,” the court said in a footnote.

The final factor in Barker is the prejudice to the defendant that is due to the delay. The police lost five audio recordings involving the police and the defendant. But losing the evidence does not establish actual prejudice where the defendant does not establish that the evidence was lost after the charges were filed. The state presented evidence that the recordings were lost before the defendant was charged and thus were not lost because of the delay.

The court went on to say that any presumptive prejudice to the defendant was ameliorated by his acquiescence to the delay.

Based on this analysis, the court said that the state did not violate the defendant’s constitutional rights.

An enumerated right

The dissent argued that the majority undermined the central tenet of Barker, which is that the defendant has no duty to bring himself to trial. By saying that the defendant likely was aware of the charges against him, the court “improperly infers that an uncounseled defendant’s failure to bring himself to trial in response to a summons constitutes an effective waiver of his constitutional right to a speedy trial,” Hudson wrote.

“Enumerated [constitutional] rights cannot operate on mere probabilities,” Hudson continued.

The dissent also argued that the state did not counter the defendant’s assertion that the lost evidence is prejudicial because transcripts of the recordings may not be admissible and would not convey the tone and inflections of the speakers. Finally, Hudson wrote, where presumptive prejudice is inherent in delay, lack of affirmative proof of prejudice is not neutral.