Daniel Carpenter v. United States

In Moore v. Arizona, 414 U.S. 25 (1973), this Court vacated the conviction of an accused murderer, and determined per curiam that: “Inordinate delay, wholly aside from possible prejudice to a defense on the merits, may seriously interfere with the defendant's liberty, whether he is free on bail or not, and . . . may disrupt his employment, drain his financial resources, curtail his associations, subject him to public obloquy, and create anxiety in him, his family and his friends.” Moore at 27, citing United States v. Marion, 404 U.S. 307, 320-21 (1971) and Barker v. Wingo, 407 U.S. 514, 537 (1972) (WHITE, J. concurring). Four years later in 1977 in United States v. Lovasco, 431 U.S. 782 (1977), this Court considered the prosecution’s “long delay” of “more than 18 months” to indict the defendant for the reason of “furthering the investigation” did not “offend the standards of fair play and decency” so as to violate the standards of due process. Id. at 793-96. In her concurring opinion in Betterman v. Montana, 136 S.Ct. 1609 (2016), Justice Sotomayor suggested that the test for a Due Process delay in sentencing should be the now familiar Speedy Trial standard of Barker v. Wingo. This is the unique case where this Court can finally set the uniform standard for pre-indictment Due Process delay, Speedy Trial Act delay, Sixth Amendment Speedy Trial delay, and Due Process delay in sentencing. The questions presented are: Whether the Government’s prosecution of the Petitioner in this case violated his Sixth Amendment right to a Speedy Trial and/or his Fifth Amendment right to Due Process because of the inordinate pre-indictment delay, the prejudicial post-indictment delay, and the extraordinary post-verdict delay in sentencing? If a Judge merely thinks about the Speedy Trial Act factors in his own mind, but does not set forth his findings in the record, does that satisfy this Court’s standard under Zedner v. United States, 547 U.S. 489 (2006) and United States v. Bloate, 559 U.S. 196 (2010)? Did the Petitioner become the “accused” for the purposes of the Speedy Trial Clause as described in Marion, when a magistrate judge issued a search warrant allegedly based on “probable cause” on April 19, 2010 and May 25, 2011?