Bloate v. United States
From ScotusWiki
Argued October 6, 2009.
Authorship: Scott Street of Akin Gump (with Howe & Russell's Kevin Russell covering the cert.-stage proceedings)
Docket: 08-728
Issue: Whether time granted at the request of a defendant to prepare pretrial motions qualifies as “delay resulting from other proceedings concerning the defendant” and is thus excludable from the time within which trial must commence under the Speedy Trial Act of 1974, 18 U.S.C. 3161 et seq.
Contents |
Briefs and Documents
Oral Argument
Transcript (October 6, 2009)
Merits Briefs
- Brief for Petitioner Taylor James Bloate
- Brief for Respondent United States of America
- Reply Brief for Petitioner Taylor James Bloate
Amicus Briefs
Certiorari-Stage Documents
Oral Argument Recap
For the most part, the Supreme Court considers two types of legal issues. It decides constitutional questions; on those issues, the Court gets to decide what the law should be. It also decides questions about federal statutes. On those questions, the Court certainly has the power to say, in the words of Marbury v. Madison, “what the law is,” but it has always said that its primary goal is to determine Congress’s intent, rather than what it thinks the law means.
Notwithstanding this sentiment, spectators at the oral argument in Bloate v. United States might have believed that several of the justices were acting as legislators. For example, Justice Ginsburg suggested that it would be unfair to include the time that a defendant spends preparing a pretrial motion in the Speedy Trial Act’s seventy-day clock, but nonetheless to exclude the time that the government spends responding to the defendant’s motion, even if the government receives additional time to respond to the motion. Justice Sotomayor wondered if judges would refuse to grant defendants additional time to prepare their pretrial motions if the judge had to issue findings on the record to exclude that time from the speedy trial clock. Similarly, several justices seemed concerned with the fact that different districts allocate different times for responding to pretrial motions. For example, one district may give a party seven days to respond to a motion, while another district gives a party twenty-one days to respond. With those different rules in place, the speedy trial clock will take longer to run in some districts because, as the parties here agree, the time spent responding to and deciding a pretrial motion is automatically excludable.
Although all of these concerns are legitimate, they have no relevance in this case. For instance, Congress lets the federal districts make their own rules for considering pretrial motions. Nothing in the Speedy Trial Act says that federal judges must spend the same amount of time deciding a pretrial motion in order to automatically exclude that time.
Because this case involves statutory interpretation, it was not surprising to see Justices Alito and Scalia focus on the plain language of the Speedy Trial Act. Justice Alito wondered whether time granted to prepare a pretrial motion could reasonably be called a period of delay resulting from a “continuance,” such that it would qualify for exclusion from the speedy trial clock if the district judge found that the delay served the interests of justice and outweighed the defense and public interest in having a speedy trial. Justice Scalia then pondered how the government could define a “proceeding” concerning the defendant to include additional time spent preparing a pretrial motion when Congress specifically mentioned pretrial motions in the Speedy Trial Act; in his view, judges should automatically exclude time from the filing of the motion through its prompt disposition. Moreover, he noted, the Senate Judiciary Committee explicitly rejected a request by the Justice Department to include preparation time in that example because it found the request unreasonable, thereby strongly suggesting that Congress did not intend to automatically exclude such time under the “other proceedings” provision.
Justice Stevens, meanwhile, pointed out that, under the government’s rule, some actions could qualify as both a “proceeding concerning the defendant,” and thus be automatically excluded from the speedy trial clock, and as a “continuance,” which would be excluded only if the judge specifically found that the granting of the continuance served the interests of justice and outweighed the speedy trial interests.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Bloate, however, is that the breadth of the “other proceedings” language that Congress used in the Speedy Trial Act arguably supports the government’s interpretation. How, then, do we figure out what the statute means? At the very least, I expected the Court to focus more on the purpose of the Speedy Trial Act, which Congress enacted to further the criminal defendant’s constitutional right to receive a speedy trial. Obviously, it would offend the defendant’s speedy trial right to automatically exclude such time if the government requested it. But why should a defendant complain about interfering with his own right to a speedy trial? Thus, it seems logical to automatically exclude additional time that a defendant requests to prepare pretrial motions.
On the other hand, the Court has long recognized that the Speedy Trial Act also serves the public interest. As a result, it recently held that a defendant cannot prospectively waive his right to a speedy trial. And the Act itself states that a period of delay resulting from a “continuance” cannot be excluded simply because the defendant requested it—the judge must balance the interests of justice against the speedy trial interests to exclude that delay.
Those dueling policies collide in this case. But you would not know it from listening to the oral argument.
The Chief Justice raised a point that nobody else had considered but that ultimately will not decide this case. Here, when Bloate appeared at his arraignment, a magistrate judge set September 13 as the deadline for filing pretrial motions. Bloate asked for additional time to prepare those motions on September 7 and the judge granted his request the same day, extending the filing deadline to September 25 and setting the hearing on pretrial motions for October 4. On September 25, Bloate filed a pleading stating that he wished to waive his right to file pretrial motions. The magistrate judge considered that request at the October 4 hearing and granted it.
The lower courts treated the entire September 7 to October 4 period as automatically excludable. But, as the Chief Justice noted, the “delay” that resulted from Bloate’s request for additional time occurred from September 13 to September 25, the period between the date that Bloate was supposed to file his pretrial motions and the date the judge extended that deadline to (everybody agrees that the period between the filing and the court’s disposition of the motion must be excluded). That seems correct to me: how can a period that was already set aside for preparing pretrial motions constitute a “delay”?
Neither attorney expected that question and, therefore, neither could explain how the Chief Justice’s calculation would affect this case. In fact, even if we count the time between September 7 and 13 against the speedy trial clock, Bloate was still brought to trial in under 70 days. Thus, the Court will still have to resolve the conflict between the Speedy Trial Act’s dueling policies and I hope that they focus on more important issues than those that dominated the oral argument in doing so.
Pre-Argument Articles
Argument Preview
Background
The Speedy Trial Act requires that a criminal defendant be tried within seventy days of the later of his (1) indictment or (2) first appearance in court. In calculating that 70-day period, the Act automatically excludes, among other things, “any period of delay resulting from other proceedings concerning the defendant.” The Act does not define these “other proceedings,” but instead provides that they include – but are not limited to – “any pretrial motion, from the filing of the motion through the conclusion of the hearing on, or other prompt disposition of, such motion.” The statute also authorizes a court to exclude “[a]ny period of delay resulting from a continuance granted by any judge on his own motion or at the request of the defendant or his counsel or at the request of the attorney for the Government,” as long as “the judge granted such continuance on the basis of his findings that the ends of justice served by taking such action outweigh the best interest of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial.” However, the statute requires the court to explain its reasons for granting the continuance on the record.
In this case, petitioner Taylor James Bloate was arrested after a traffic stop led police to discover two bags of cocaine in his car, as well as additional drug paraphernalia, weapons, and cash in an apartment that belonged to his girlfriend (and in which, the evidence suggested, Bloate himself lived). Bloate was indicted for possession of a firearm and possession of cocaine with intent to distribute on August 24, 2006. On September 7, 2006, Bloate asked the district court to extend the deadline for preparing and filing pretrial motions to September 25. The court granted this request, but Bloate eventually changed his mind; on October 4, 2006, a magistrate judge granted him leave to waive his right to file any pretrial motions. Trial was delayed for several more months and eventually scheduled for late February 2007.
On February 19, 2007, Bloate moved to dismiss the indictment under the Speedy Trial Act. The district court denied the motion. The parties now agree that the district court properly excluded most of the time between Bloate’s August 24, 2006 indictment and the February 2007 trial date. But they disagree about the 28-day delay – from September 7 to October 4 – that resulted from Bloate’s request to extend the time for preparing pretrial motions. The district court automatically excluded that time as a period of delay resulting from “other proceedings concerning the defendant.”
On appeal, the Eighth Circuit agreed and affirmed. Construing the Act’s list of delay resulting from “other proceedings concerning the defendant” as illustrative, rather than exhaustive, it concluded that delay resulting from the preparation of pretrial motions was sufficiently related to such proceedings to warrant automatic exclusion. The Eighth Circuit’s view is shared by seven other circuits, which have similarly concluded that courts must exclude pretrial motion preparation time as part of another proceeding concerning the defendant. By contrast, two circuits have concluded that pretrial motion preparation time cannot automatically be excluded because Congress, in listing some examples of other proceedings concerning the defendant, indicated only that “delay resulting from any pretrial motion, from the filing of the motion through the conclusion of the hearing on, or other prompt disposition of, such motion” should be automatically excluded.
Bloate filed a petition for certiorari, which the Supreme Court granted on April 20, 2009.
Petitioner’s Arguments
Bloate’s argument seems very simple. The speedy trial clock does not count periods of delay resulting from “other proceedings concerning the defendant.” But because the statute specifically discusses “delay resulting from any pretrial motion, from the filing of the motion through the conclusion of the hearing on, or other prompt disposition of, such motion,” Congress intended not to automatically exclude any time spent working on the motion before it was filed. He supports this reading by using various canons of statutory interpretation. Perhaps most importantly, he contends that excluding pre-filing preparation time would render the starting point referred to in the Act’s example meaningless, and thus render the entire example superfluous. He also points out that the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to add preparation time to the automatic exclusion example in the late 1970s. Finally, he argues that the specificity of the pretrial motion example, coupled with the comparative open-endedness of other such examples, reflects Congress’s that preparation time not be automatically excluded from the speedy trial clock.
In Bloate’s view, it would be more appropriate, and more consistent with the goals of the Speedy Trial Act, to only automatically exclude delay that relates to a pretrial motion after a pretrial motion is filed, while giving courts discretion to exclude preparation time under the provision that allows a court to exclude “[a]ny period of delay resulting from a continuance granted by any judge on his own motion or at the request of the defendant or his counsel or at the request of the attorney for the Government if the judge granted such continuance on the basis of his findings 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 fact, Bloate posits, many courts already do precisely that, but mistakenly indicate that they are instead deciding the issue under the automatic exclusion.
Respondent’s Arguments
The United States argues that the Speedy Trial Act automatically excludes “delays arising from proceedings aimed at advancing the defendant’s case towards trial or other resolution, especially procedures of which the defendant might seek to take advantage in pursuing his defense,” and therefore includes proceedings that are analogous or ancillary to the proceedings that the statute specifically mentions. In this case, because time spent preparing a pretrial motion is both analogous and ancillary to pretrial motion proceedings themselves, it should be automatically excluded under the statute. Moreover, automatically excluding such time furthers the goal of the Speedy Trial Act, because trial judges would not grant defendants much time to prepare these motions if the time were not automatically excluded and, thus, the parties would have to “rush to trial” to satisfy the Speedy Trial clock.
The government also disputes Bloate’s interpretation of the scope of the examples contained in the Speedy Trial Act’s list of automatic exclusions and challenges his reading of the statute’s legislative history. For example, the Act expressly provides that its automatic exclusions “include[e] but [are] not limited to” the enumerated situations. Furthermore, the Solicitor General contends that Congress added the specific pretrial motion language to the statute in 1979 to override judicial decisions that had limited excluded delay to time the parties spent in judicial proceedings related to pretrial motions, rather than the entire period of delay that resulted once the defendant filed a pretrial motion. And the government argues that, while Congress did not want to automatically exclude all time that courts routinely allot for motion preparation, it “did not address whether to exclude the narrower subset of additional preparation time granted at a defendant’s specific request,” thus limiting the relevance of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s action.
Amicus Briefs
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed the only amicus brief in this case. It supports Bloate, arguing that the United States’s attempt to expand the automatic exclusions violates the will of Congress and impedes the purpose of the Speedy Trial Act. Interestingly, in this sense, it challenges the government’s argument that the Court must exclude motion preparation time to ensure that defendants receive a fair and speedy trial. First, the NACDL rejects the generalization that defendants benefit from a delay in preparing pretrial motions, even if they request the extra preparation time. More important, according to the NACDL, Congress decided that, “as concerns motions practice, the benefits of speedy trials are subordinate to the administrative needs of the trial judge, not the litigants.”
Things to Watch for During Oral Argument
Both parties in this case concede that the “other proceedings” provision of the Speedy Trial Act is ambiguous because it specifically lists examples of delay that result from other proceedings concerning the defendant but also states that those examples are not exhaustive. Furthermore, the delay at issue here is not mentioned in the “other proceedings” provision, even though Congress gave an example of delay related to pretrial motions that would be automatically excluded in that sub-section.
Thus, you would think that Bloate should turn on the method of statutory interpretation the Court uses to resolve the ambiguity. But that might not resolve things. For example, the Court could say “expressio unius est exclusio alterius”—the expression of one thing (courts must exclude time from the filing of a pretrial motion) implies the exclusion of other things (courts cannot automatically exclude pretrial motion preparation time). But Congress also said that the enumerated examples are not exhaustive. So perhaps “expressio unius” will not work.
In that case, the Court could either try to figure out what Congress actually meant when it said that courts must automatically exclude delay resulting from “other proceedings concerning the defendant,” as Bloate would like it to do, or it could focus on whether automatically excluding these periods of delay serves the purpose of the Speedy Trial Act, which the United States would prefer. The latter approach might appeal to the justices, but the Court would have to hurdle two obstacles to use it. First, it would have to explain why such an approach does not effectively read the discretionary exclusion provision out of the Speedy Trial Act, because that sub-section does exactly what the government wants the Court to do in automatically excluding pretrial motion preparation time. Second, it would have to distinguish the Senate Judiciary Committee’s decision to exclude similar language when it drafted the “other proceedings” examples in 1979. Neither obstacle is easy to overcome, and the government does not offer many convincing reasons for hurdling them in its brief. Therefore, I will be watching to see if the Court presses the Solicitor General for any better reasons, or if it ignores the hurdles altogether.
Grant Write-Up
The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Bloate v. United States, No. 08-728, to address a question that has divided the courts of appeals regarding the operation of the Speedy Trial Act.
1. The Speedy Trial Act requires that a defendant be brought to trial within 70 days of his indictment or arraignment, whichever comes later. The statute, however, provides that certain periods of time do not count toward the 70 days. One such exception is the period of delay “resulting from other proceedings concerning the defendant, including but not limited to . . . delay resulting from any pretrial motion.” 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(F). The excluded time runs from “the filing of the motion through the conclusion of the hearing upon, or other prompt disposition of, such motion.” Id. § 3161(h)(1)(D).
In this case, petitioner Taylor James Bloate was arraigned on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and with possessing cocaine base with intent to distribute. After the district court set an initial deadline for pretrial motions, Bloate’s court-appointed public defender asked for a 13 day extension to file pretrial motions, which the court granted. Bloate eventually waived his right to file any pretrial motions. This process took 28 days in total, from the arraignment to the date the court allowed Bloate to waive the right to file pretrial motions.
Bloate subsequently moved to dismiss the indictment because of excessive delay under the Speedy Trial Act. He argued that given subsequent delays, the 28 day pretrial motion preparation period put the Government over the 70-day speedy trial limit unless the 28 days fell within one of the statutory exemptions. Bloate further argued that because the statute expressly excludes only the time from the filing of a pretrial motion to the resolution of the motion, the time spent preparing the motion is not excluded. The district court disagreed, holding that the statute also excludes, more generally, other time spent in “other proceedings concerning the defendant,” which it understood to include the motion preparation time.
The trial went forward and Bloate was convicted. On appeal, the Eighth Circuit affirmed, agreeing with the district court that the Act’s specific mention of the time between the filing of and decision upon a pretrial motion was simply “illustrative” and that the time allowed for pretrial motions should also be excluded under the broad phrase “proceedings concerning the defendant.”
2. Bloate, represented by the University of Virginia Law School Supreme Court Clinic and others, filed a petition for certiorari. The petition asserted that there is a deep split among the courts of appeals over whether the specific exclusion of the time spent responding to and deciding pretrial motions implies that the time spent preparing them is not excluded. In particular, the Eighth Circuit and seven others hold that the time does not count, while the Fourth and Sixth Circuits have held that it does.
In response, the United States acknowledged the circuit split, but asserted that the difference among the circuits rarely has any practical effect. The Government noted that there is a residual exception that allows the court to exclude time from counting toward the 70 days when the “ends of justice” so requires. Moreover, the Government argued that for various reasons, even if the time for preparation of pretrial motions counted, Bloate’s trial still fell within the 70 days allowed by the Speedy Trial Act, an assertion Bloate disputed in his reply brief.
3. On the merits, the parties agree that the Speedy Trial Act excludes “delay resulting from other proceedings concerning the defendant,” and that the statute does not specifically define that term. Instead, the statute gives a list of time periods that fall within that rule, a list that everyone acknowledges is not exhaustive. The statutory interpretation question, then, is how broadly the general phrase should be read, and what significance the Court should give to the fact that one of the examples specifically addresses pretrial motions but expressly excludes only the time between the filing and decision on the motion, and does not expressly exclude time spent preparing the motion.
It would be quite odd, Bloate argues, for Congress to expressly exclude only a portion of the time relating to pretrial motions, yet to intend that courts could broaden that time period under the general “proceedings concerning the defendant” heading. Reading that general phrase to encompass time spent in pretrial preparations on motions, petitioner argues, would render virtually all time spent in pretrial preparations excluded from the Speedy Trial Act calculation, rendering the limitation largely meaningless. Petitioner further argues that the legislative and drafting history of the provision supports his view.
The Government’s brief in opposition spends less time addressing the merits of the claim and, as a result, provides less insight into what the Solicitor General is likely to argue on the merits. The Government’s brief does, however, point out that motion preparation time is not listed among the specific examples of time that must be included in the Speedy Trial calculation. Moreover, as a literal matter, the fact that the statute specifically excludes time spent responding to and deciding a pretrial motion does not mean that the preparatory time cannot also be excluded; after all, the list of specifically excluded time is prefaced by the phrase “including but not limited to,” and the general phrase “proceeding concerning the defendant” is very broad. In addition, accepting petitioner’s construction, the Government suggests, “would lead to the odd result that, while time granted to prepare a response to a pretrial motion is excludable . . . time granted to prepare the motion itself would not be excludable.”
The case will be briefed over the next several months and scheduled for argument in the Fall (in all likelihood in the November sitting).
