“Systemic Breakdown”: Obscuring Crisis in Speedy Trial Right Analysis

Courts across the country force indigent criminal defendants to spend absurd amounts of time in pretrial detention, where they endure the horrors of incarceration, the stigma of guilt, and the diminished ability to mount an effective defense. These defendants spend months, years, even decades, waiting for their innocence to be vindicated. The consequence of this delay is that the poor, regardless of their innocence, are de facto prisoners, and their public defenders, once imagined as the fulfillment of our Constitution’s loftiest ideals, are the unknowing foot soldiers of chronic crisis. The criminal legal system forces these public defenders to endure crushing caseloads that jeopardize their clients’ lives. Yet the legal community has become acclimated to this status quo, a “systemic breakdown” in indigent criminal defense—one that punishes the poor and subjects them to unreasonable and unconscionable delay. This Note brings attention to the madness. Centered around the Supreme Court’s decision in Vermont v. Brillon, which coined the term that inadequately addresses this unconscionable delay, this Note argues that there has indeed been “systemic breakdown” in our public defender system. The government hamstrings public defender offices by wrongfully blaming them and their indigent clients for the same delay these offices and defendants decry. But many courts, including the highest court in the land, refuse to see this breakdown and instead construe the law to absolve the government of its own inadequacy. Beginning with the country’s history of indigent criminal defense, this Note connects political choices with Supreme Court decisions to argue that public defenders, like their clients, are the victims of constitutional root rot.