The Scratchbread Team Opens a Gluten-Free Bakery in Williamsburg eater.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eater.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
9th Circuit reversal in pandemic jury trial dismissal could foreshadow 4 pending appeals
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
(Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)
Print
In an ominous sign for four other criminal defendants, a Newport Beach physician is due back in an Orange County federal courtroom after an appellate court reversed a judge’s dismissal of his charges.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals determined April 23 that U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney erred when he dismissed Jeffrey Olsen’s 34-count indictment because of the court’s pandemic-related ban on jury trials, sharply rebuking a constitutional stance that had become somewhat of a crusade for Carney.
Print
In a partial rebuke of a lower court jurist, a federal appeals court decided Friday that criminal defendants were not robbed of their right to speedy trials or forced unconstitutionally to remain behind bars because the COVID-19 pandemic delayed their trials.
“Surely a global pandemic that has claimed more than half a million lives in this country, and nearly 60,000 in California alone, falls within such unique circumstances to permit a court to temporarily suspend jury trials in the interest of public health,” said a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court ruling effectively affirms that COVID-19 was an emergency that forced some courts to take unprecedented steps, including delaying proceedings. It means that criminal defendants are unlikely to prevail in claiming they should escape charges or get out of jail because of pandemic-induced delays.
Print
Ronald Ware spent five months in a Santa Ana jail awaiting trial after his arrest in Brea last summer on a federal gun charge.
His day in court never came. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney dismissed the case in January, saying emergency rules that shut down federal jury trials during the pandemic had denied Ware his right to a speedy trial.
“Nowhere in the Constitution is there an exception for times of emergency or crisis,” Carney wrote in the ruling that set Ware free.
Carney has tossed criminal charges against a jewelry-store robbery suspect and three others for the same reason. The decision to shut down all jury trials, he found, was excessive.