In practice, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
(As with other rights, these rights sometimes require active defense by civil rights organizations, nor are they completely absolute.)
If you're found guilty in a trial, you get a 2-4 times longer sentence than the plea deal would have given.
So the theoretical right to a trial remains, but exercising that right is heavily penalized. To me that means the right is for practical purposes no longer exists.
My being able to opt to voluntarily testify doesn't mean the right to remain silent doesn't exist. We'd have no rights by your definition.
Another angle is that plead bargains are necessary to put as many people in jail as we do.
The judicial system would completely break down if it needed to have 50x as many trials.
Yes. I'd argue that's not universally or even mostly a good thing.
The right exists whether or not your state has legislation defining a timeframe, too.
The nuance is the US court system allows additional punishment if a defendant chooses to go to trial. Also, plea bargaining usually involves lots of prosecutor bluffing before they have to show discovery which is the same time they can “throw the book at the defendant” (overload the charges beyond what they can actually prove to a jury).
It’s also worth mentioning that the speedy trial can sometimes come with strings attached (as Georgia’s statute which has been recently discussed ad nauseum in the cases of 2 of the 19 2020-electoral-college-RICO defendants)
In this case overthrowing is actual a protest that went out of control because of lax security. A real overthrow attempt would need to involve heavy weapons. Protesters didn't even have butter knives.
Only for some of the people involved. However, there were certainly people there attempting an actual overthrow[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/oath-keepers...
There have been a few defendants who have successfully challenged the speed of the trial and courts have let them off. It’s far more likely that the DOJ attorneys are simply overwhelmed with the prosecution than they are purposefully persecuting the arrested.
> According to the George Washington Program on Extremism, the FBI has arrested 940 people in connection to January 6. Of those, 43 were convicted, 481 pleaded guilty, and 382 are still waiting for trial. Most of the people waiting are out on bail. [1]
It so happens that the defendants all committed crimes on the same day, causing a backlog. It also happens that DC is a strange jurisdiction that requires coordination between federal officers of different departments (Capitol Police, Parks Police, Secret Service, etc) in a town that must get all funding passed through Congress, which is functionally broken most of the year.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/170991/cpac-january-6-riot-p...
Pretrial detention can often happen for years, it's one of the issues that makes guilty pleas so insidious. Even if you are innocent, wanting to get your day in court can require you to spend months in jail, so a guilty plea can actually be the more economical outcome.
It's worth noting that one of the examples was someone changing his lawyer repeatedly. I don't believe the right to a speedy trial is violated if you're the one that causes your own delay.
That right can be waived to give the defense time to prepare, and it isn't always enforced for non-citizens detained abroad (e.g. Guantanamo), but I'm unaware of anything similar to the article happening in the US.