Welcome to Spodek Law Group. Our goal is to give you the reality of speedy trial rights in federal court - not the textbook explanation you'll find on government websites, not the reassuring fiction that the system moves quickly, but the actual truth about what happens when the clock starts ticking on your case. The difference between what the law promises and what actually happens could determine whether you spend the next two years fighting for your freedom or trapped in legal limbo.
The Speedy Trial Act of 1974 promises you something clear: trial within 70 days of indictment. On paper, this sounds like protection. Seventy days is just over two months. In theory, your case should be resolved quickly, allowing you to move on with your life one way or another. The reality is so different from this promise that it borders on cruel irony. Federal felony cases take an average of 606 days from charge to disposition - nearly twenty months. The "70-day" clock that's supposed to protect you barely runs at all.
This isn't a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed. The mechanism that transforms 70 days into 606 is called "excludable time," and once you understand how it operates, you'll never look at speedy trial rights the same way again. Every pretrial motion, every continuance request, every complexity finding stops that clock. The exceptions have swallowed the rule entirely.
The 70-Day Promise Nobody Keeps
Heres the thing most people don't understand about the Speedy Trial Act. The statute says 70 days. Defense attorneys know the real number is closer to 18-24 months for most federal cases. Some take even longer. The gap between what the law says and what actualy happens is the first lesson every defendant learns the hard way.
The Act provides for something called "excludable time" - periods that don't count against the 70-day limit. On paper, these exclusions seem reasonable. Time for pretrial motions. Time for mental competency evaluations. Time when a defendant or witness is unavailable. Time when a co-defendant's proceedings affect your case. But watch what happens when you add them up.
Consider a typical federal fraud case. The defendant is indicted in January. The 70-day clock starts. Then the defense files a motion to suppress evidence obtained through a search warrant they believe was defective. Clock stops. The motion sits on the judge's calendar for three months before a hearing is scheduled. All that time is excluded. The judge takes the motion under advisement for another sixty days. More excluded time. By the time the motion is resolved - denied, in most cases - five months have passed, but the speedy trial clock has only counted about twenty days. This pattern repeats with every substantive motion, every discovery dispute, every scheduling conflict.
Every single pretrial motion you file - even ones you're required to file - stops the clock. The entire period from filing to the court's resolution is excluded. Motion to suppress evidence? That's weeks or months off the clock. Motion to compel discovery? More time gone. Your attorney files a motion for more time to prepare? Clock stops. The prosecution asks for a continuance to locate a witness? Stops again.
The most powerful clock-stopper is the "ends of justice" continuance under 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(7). A judge can grant this if they find that "the ends of justice served by taking such action outweigh the best interest of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial." In practise, this gives courts nearly unlimited discretion. Complex case? Ends of justice continuance. Attorney needs more prep time? Ends of justice. Court docket is congested? You guessed it. The provision that was supposed to be an exception has become the rule, and the 70-day promise evaporates into legal mist.
What makes this even more frustrating is the mathematics of federal prosecution. The government doesn't file cases it hasn't already investigated thoroughly. By the time you see an indictment, federal agents have spent months - sometimes years - building their case. They've interviewed witnesses, subpoenaed records, analyzed financial transactions, and mapped out every aspect of the alleged crime. Your 70-day clock only starts running after all that preparation is complete.
Why Your Own Lawyer Wants You To Wait
This is were it gets uncomfortable. Your own defense attorney - the person who's supposed to protect your rights - will often ask you to waive your speedy trial rights. Not becuase they don't care about you. Because they understand something you probably dont: the government has been investigating you for months or years before you even knew you were a target.
Think about that asymetry. Federal prosecutors don't bring cases they haven't thoroughly prepared. By the time your indicted, they've interviewed witnesses, gathered documents, analyzed financial records, and built their case piece by piece. You just found out about it. And the speedy trial clock only starts running AFTER the indictment is filed. The government's head start is built into the system by design.
So when your lawyer says "we need to waive speedy trial," they're not betraying you. They're trying to level a playing field that's already tilted dramaticly against you. Rushing to trial within 70 days often means going in unprepared against a prosecution that's had years to get ready. Its like agreeing to a race where your opponent has already run half the course before the starting gun fires. The race was never fair. The question is whether you make it even more unfair by running before you've stretched.
Defense attorneys face a brutal calculus. They can demand speedy trial and risk going to trial without adequate preparation. Or they can waive speedy trial and watch their client's life remain in legal limbo for a year or more. Neither option is good. Both options have serious consequences. The system forces this choice on every defendant, and there's no path that doesn't involve sacrifice.
CRITICAL WARNING: Demanding your speedy trial rights without understanding this dynamic can destroy your defense before it begins.
The Clock That Never Runs
What makes the speedy trial clock so toothless is how easily it stops. The Supreme Court ruled in Henderson v. United States that the clock excludes "all time between the filing of a motion and the conclusion of the hearing on that motion" - regardless of whether the delay is "reasonably necessary." So if a motion sits on a judge's desk for six months waiting for a hearing, that's all excluded. None of it counts against the 70 days. The defendant waits, the clock doesn't run, and the promise of speedy resolution becomes meaningless.
Heres were it gets even worse. If you're charged with co-defendants, their delays become your delays. Under 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(7), excludable time for one defendant is ascribed to all co-defendants. So your co-defendant files a bunch of motions, asks for continuance after continuance, and your clock is tolled right along with theirs. You could do absolutly nothing to cause delay and still watch years pass because of someone else's legal strategy. You're not in control. You never were.
And the "ends of justice" provisions? Judges will grant them for basicly any articulated reason. Court congestion. Case complexity. The need for more attorney preparation time. The statute says the court must set forth its reasons for the continuance, but as long as they say something on the record, courts of appeal almost never second-guess the finding. The appellate deference to trial court discretion means that judges have essentially unchecked power to stop the clock whenever they choose.
Todd Spodek has seen this pattern hundreds of times. A client comes in expecting their 70-day guarantee to mean something, and slowly watches the realization dawn that the clock is more fiction then reality. The number 70 appears in the statute, but the number 606 - the average days to disposition - tells you what actualy happens in the federal system.
What Happens When You Actually Demand Speedy Trial
OK so lets say you understand all this and you still want to demand speedy trial. Maybe you're sitting in pretrial detention and every day feels like a year. Maybe you're on release but the case is destroying your ability to work, to plan, to live any kind of normal life. You tell your lawyer: I want my 70 days. No waivers.
Heres what happens next. Your lawyer files a motion refusing to waive time. The court sets a trial date within the statutory period. And now your defense team has weeks - maybe a few months if you're lucky - to prepare a defense against a prosecution that's been building for years. Witnesses haven't been located. Experts haven't been retained. Discovery - which can be thousands of pages of documents, recordings, financial records - hasn't been fully analyzed. The defense scrambles while the prosecution presents a polished case they've been perfecting for months.
You go to trial. The prosecution presents a case they've been polishing for months or years. Your defense presents what it could cobble together in weeks. The conviction rate in federal court is 99.6%. Not a typo. Real number. And then comes the cruel irony: when you appeal arguing inadequate time to prepare, the appellate court says you WAIVED that argument by demanding speedy trial. You asked for fast, you got fast, you can't complain now.
CRITICAL WARNING: Demanding speedy trial without adequite preparation often results in conviction followed by an appeals court saying you brought it on yourself.
The consequence cascade looks like this: Demand speedy trial → rushed preparation → inadequate defense → conviction → appeal denied becuase you asked for fast trial. Every step follows logicaly from the first, and by the time you realize the trap, its too late to escape.
This is why experienced federal defense attorneys almost always recommend waiving speedy trial in serious cases. Not because they're selling you out. Because they understand that the 70-day clock is designed to pressure defendants, not protect them. Demanding your right often means giving up the time you need to mount an effective defense.
When Dismissal Doesn't Mean Freedom
Let's say the government actualy violates your speedy trial rights. The clock runs out, you file a motion to dismiss, and the court agrees there's been a violation. You won, right? You're free?
Not necessaraly. And this is were most people's understanding of speedy trial completly breaks down. Stop and think about what should happen here. The government had a legal obligation to bring you to trial within a certain timeframe. They failed to meet that obligation. In any normal system of accountability, failure to meet a legal deadline would have consequences. The case should be over. You should walk away.
But federal court doesn't work like any normal system of accountability.
The Speedy Trial Act provides for dismissal when the time limits are violated - but it can be dismissal WITH prejudice or WITHOUT prejudice. With prejudice means it's over, they can't bring the charges again. Without prejudice means they can immediately re-indict you, start a new case with a new case number, and you're right back where you started.
Guess which one courts usualy grant?
In assessing whether dismissal should be with or without prejudice, courts consider the seriousness of the offense, the circumstances that led to the dismissal, and the impact that reprosecution would have on the administration of justice. For serious federal offenses - the kind that carry years in prison - courts are extremly reluctant to grant dismissal with prejudice. They don't want dangerous criminals walking free because of a procedural violation. So the same courts that let the clock run out will still give the government a second chance to prosecute you.
The result is that even when you WIN on speedy trial, you often don't really win. In United States v. Murta, a 2024 Fifth Circuit case, the defendant successfully got dismissal for a speedy trial violation. The appellate court affirmed that there was a violation - but remanded to determine whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice. Even victory becomes another round of litigation. Even winning means more waiting.
So the consequence chain for speedy trial violations often looks like this: Clock runs out → you file motion → court grants dismissal → dismissal is WITHOUT prejudice → government re-indicts → new case number, new 70-day clock → you're back to square one, except now the prosecution has seen your defense strategy and can adapt. The victory was hollow. The fight continues.
The Barker Test: Why Constitutional Speedy Trial Is Dead
Maybe you're thinking: OK, the Speedy Trial Act is broken, but I still have the Sixth Amendment. The Constitution guarentees a speedy trial. Surely that protects me.
Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to tell you. The constitutional speedy trial right is even harder to enforce then the statute.
The Supreme Court established the test for Sixth Amendment speedy trial claims in Barker v. Wingo (1972). The court laid out four factors that must be balanced: (1) length of the delay, (2) reason for the delay, (3) whether the defendant asserted their right, and (4) prejudice to the defendant. Sounds reasonable, right?
Look at what happened in that case. The defendant waited FIVE YEARS for trial. There were sixteen continuances. Sixteen. The case dragged on for half a decade while the defendant's life sat in limbo. And the Supreme Court found NO Sixth Amendment violation. Why? Becuase the defendant hadn't "asserted his right" strongly enough during most of the delay.
The Court actualy said that Barker's failure to demand speedy trial showed that "he definitely did not want to be tried" and that he had made a "strategic choice." Five years. Sixteen continuances. No constitutional violation. The message is clear: the Sixth Amendment speedy trial right is almost impossible to enforce.
If five years with sixteen continuances isn't enough to win a constitutional speedy trial claim, what is? The answer, in practise, is almost nothing. The Barker balancing test gives courts so much discretion that the right is effectivly dead. It's there on paper, in the Bill of Rights, but it's almost never a basis for dismissing criminal charges. Defense attorneys know this. Prosecutors know this. Courts know this. The only people who don't know it are defendants who think the Constitution actualy means what it says.
What makes this particularly troubling is the interplay between the statutory Speedy Trial Act and the constitutional Sixth Amendment right. The Act was supposed to define what "speedy" actually means - to give teeth to the constitutional guarantee. Instead, the Act's many exceptions have become the new normal, and courts use the existence of the Act as a reason to apply the constitutional test even more narrowly. The argument goes: if you had a remedy under the statute and didn't pursue it, why should the Constitution bail you out? The two protections that should reinforce each other end up canceling each other out.
What This Means For Your Case
At Spodek Law Group, we give clients the reality even when it's uncomfortable. The speedy trial right is not the protection most people think it is. The 70-day clock almost never runs clean. Demanding speedy trial can backfire catastrophicly. Even winning dismissal often just means starting over.
So what do you actualy do with this information?
First, you make an informed decision about waiving speedy trial. Not based on what you wish the law was, but on what it actualy is. In many serious federal cases, waiving speedy trial rights is the right strategic choice - not because you're giving up a valuable right, but because the "right" isn't as valuable as it appears, and the time is genuinly needed to prepare a proper defense.
Second, you work with counsel who understands the nuances. The excludable time provisions are complex. The "ends of justice" continuance has specific requirements. There are situations were asserting speedy trial rights makes sense, and situations were it would be self-destructive. Knowing the diffrence requires experience in federal criminal defense.
Third, you track the clock meticulously if you do assert speedy trial rights. The burden is on you to move for dismissal BEFORE trial begins. If you fail to file that motion before jury selection starts, you've waived the right entirely. The statute is explicit about this waiver provision.
CRITICAL: Your speedy trial claim dies the moment trial begins unless you've already filed for dismissal.
Todd Spodek tells clients the truth about speedy trial becuase knowing the reality is the first step toward making smart decisions. The 70-day promise is a legal fiction. But understanding how the system actualy works gives you power to navigate it strategicly instead of being crushed by false expectations.
The federal criminal justice system moves at its own pace, not yours. Prosecutors have all the time they need, while defendants have only the time the system chooses to give them. That asymetry is built into every stage of the process. Your job is to work within that reality, not to pretend it doesn't exist.
If you're facing federal charges and trying to understand your speedy trial rights, the window for good decisions is narrow. Every day that passes is a day the prosecution uses. The question isn't whether the 70-day clock is running - it probably isn't. The question is how you use the time you have to build the strongest possible defense.
That window is closing. Call Spodek Law Group at 212-300-5196.
