It’s not me, it’s you.
It turns out that upon closer examination that Indiana Court of Appeals opinion I wrote about a couple posts ago is even worse than I thought. Take a look at these sentences from the opinion, in a case which is all about the defendant’s right to a speedy trial:
Here, _____ was charged on July 31, 2009. The trial court set the initial trial date for November 8, 2010. This was approximately 615 days after the charging date and clearly beyond the one-year limit provided for under Crim. R. 4(C). . . . Thus, he acquiesced to a belated trial date. See Vermillion v. State, 719 N.E.2d 1201, 1204 (Ind.1999). As such, we agree with the trial court’s finding that the additional 222 days of delay accumulating from March 26, 2010 to November 3, 2010 were chargeable to _____.
You don’t have to be a lawyer to go to this online date calculator and quickly see for yourself whether in fact there really were “approximately” 615 days between July 31, 2009 and November 8, 2010, or whether the Court of Appeals, in this case about the defendant’s right to a speedy trial, was off by about five months. (There’s a lot more to this case, but suffice it to say here that the initial trial date was clearly not beyond the limit provided for under Criminal Rule 4(C), and that the Court of Appeals’ gross overestimation of the number of days between the charging date and initial trial date hurt rather than helped the defendant, according to the Court of Appeals’ dubious interpretation of Vermillion. Cf. Cook v. State (Ind. 2004).)
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