A FEDERAL APPEALS COURT recently freed a man who had been incarcerated nearly seven years awaiting trial. Although the court labeled Joseph Tigano III’s pretrial incarceration “egregiously oppressive,” it suggested there was no one factor to blame. “Years of subtle neglects,” the court wrote, “resulted in a flagrant violation of Tigano's Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.”
Tigano’s case fits a familiar narrative of clogged courts and bureaucratic indifference. There is, however, another factor that has been overlooked in coverage of it. While the appeals court and subsequent media portrayals suggest that prompt trials are the solution to cases like Tigano’s, the real fix is long-delayed, bipartisan sentencing reform. That is because the problem in Tigano’s case was not neglect, but a 20-year mandatory-minimum sentence that loomed over every decision in the case.
Tigano’s case was no Agatha Christie mystery. Federal agents found 1,400 marijuana plants growing in Tigano’s residence. What’s more, three separate agents testified that Tigano confessed that he grew the marijuana. That’s a tough case to fight. He was going to lose at trial, it seemed, and he was going to lose big.
[For more on this story by JEFFREY BELLIN, go to https://www.themarshallproject.../waiting-for-justice]
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