No. of Recommendations: 7
I've been pondering this over the last couple of days.
When you sign on to any part of a criminal conspiracy, you never know how many other actors are participating who could wind up co-defendents, in either a traditional "one crime at a time" criminal trial or a racketeering oriented criminal trial ("individual crimes" + conspiracy over time to plan / commit crimes). If you're goin to enter a conspiracy, you better choose your co-conspirators carefully or don't complain about who shows up in the dock with you at trial.
When you get indicted, you have the right to defend yourself in court. You have the right to a speedy trial so you don't rot in jail for five years waiting for a trial for which you may be acquitted. You have the right to select your own counsel or if you are impoverished, you have the right to a public defender providing competent defense counsel.
But this shouldn't mean you get the right to flood the court with obviously frivoulous "motions", each requring days / weeks of back and forth between prosecutors, defenders and the judge. You shouldn't have the right to file motions at the last minute about issues that if legitimmate should have been raised on Day One. (Like Trump suddenly demanding his DC judge resign 42 days after indictment for comments she made two years ago that were available to the defendant 42 days ago.) Dozens of co-defendents absolutely do not have a blanket right to demand to be INDIVIDUALLY tried for a crime which BY ITS NATURE involved voluntary coordination AMONG defendants which must be proved in front of jurors. Doing so would reqire the state to waste resources arguing the same facts NINETEEN times in front of NINETEEN different juries of twelve people, requiring enormous effort to FIND suitable jurors and requring the state to WASTE the time of 19 x 12 jurors over facts which should only need to be presented once.
Allowing this charade to continue would set an incentive for criminals to simply scale up their conspiracies then paralyze the state or federal justice system with the sheer number of defendants, alleged crimes and actions to defer justice nearly indefinitely.
WTH
