Four years is justice delayed to a ridiculous extreme

Four years is justice delayed to a ridiculous extreme

If the case of convicted murderer Joseph P. Nazarini had dragged on much longer, he might have been sentenced to time served and walked out of court a free man.

That is, of course, an exaggeration, but it is no exaggeration to say that no one should sit in a county jail for four years before being brought to trial.

And it is a statement of fact that if Nazarini has been brought to trial within six months and shipped off to a state penitentiary, the county would have saved about $95,000, enough to keep a deputy sheriff on the road for more than two years.

The saga of Nazarini, now 59, begins with the Feb. 5, 2004, stabbing death of his wife, Denise, 52, in their Boardman home. He delayed calling police for 24 hours after the stabbing, but he quickly gave police a confession.

Nazarini’s initial pleas of innocent by reason of insanity was a contributing factor in much of the delay.

Hospitals balked when asked to produce records of Nazarini’s previous psychiatric treatment. They even ignored court orders for the records.

Then the judge who was hearing the case, Maureen Cronin, retired, Another judge, Timothy Franken, disqualified himself because he had been a prosecutor on the case. Eventually the case ended up with Judge Maureen A. Sweeney.

In the end, a plea

And finally, this week Nazarini entered a Mahoning County Common Pleas Courtroom and pleaded guilty to murder. It will be another two months before he appears again before Judge Sweeney for sentencing. He faces 15 years to life, but will receive credit for the four years served in county jail.

His defense lawyer and prosecutor agree that the difficulty in getting Nazarini’s medical records is responsible for most of the delay in bringing him to trial.

Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, four years is an intolerably long amount of time for any defendant to await trial — even if the defendant faces strong, perhaps overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

Ohio law requires that a defendant held in jail be tried within 90 days. That sometimes becomes an impossible goal to meet and the law allows the speedy trial clock to stop for various prosecution and defense motions. A defendant can also waive his right to a speedy trial.

But four years is, simple math tells us, 16 times longer than the state’s speedy trial law allows.

Such a delay not only costs the county money because it is incarcerating someone who should either be free after an acquittal or turned over to state detention after conviction, but it increases the possibility that justice will not be achieved.

Witnesses die or vanish, evidence kept for years becomes increasingly susceptible to being lost or tainted, memories fade.

Every once in a while a case comes along that barely shouts to every judge, prosecutor and lawyer in the county that something is wrong with the system. This is just such a case.

Certainly it should be the last case in which any delay is allowed to be stretched into a matter of years.