Over the weekend, Judge Nachmanoff made it clear that a large amount of discovery material is to be delivered to James Comey today. The prosecution team from North Carolina seem to be engaging in a series of stall tactics to delay this.
The eastern district of Virginia is known informally as the “rocket docket” because of its fast resolution times for cases.
Let’s say the prosecution does pony up a bunch of discovery material. Once that’s done, if the prosecution wants to introduce new things to base their case on, wouldn’t any of those additional pieces of discovery have to be newly acquired information, and not information the prosecution already had, but just didn’t draw a line to yet?
Wouldn’t that be the legal safeguard against this kind of retributive indictment? (Provided it’s actually enforced, of course.)
That’s my understanding, yeah. In theory, when the state demands to take away your liberty or your life they need to have what legal experts call “a case”. Sounds like trump’s Insurance Lawyer Illustrated prosecutor might be in a bit of a binder here.
In many jurisdictions, courts will allow prosecutors to “remedy” slipups to some degree by delaying the trial date, allowing the defense the same time they would have had to prepare, or at least an adequate time.
It definitely seems like that is not going to happen in this district.
There’s a bunch of complicated case law about missed disclosures and late disclosures.
How does that not immediately result in dismissal every single time, due to violating the defendant’s right to a speedy trial?