A sexual assault survivor waits four years for trial, reliving trauma with each postponement, only to watch witnesses forget crucial details and the case collapse from memory decay. An accused person spends three years in pretrial detention then is acquitted, having lost employment, housing, and relationships while legally innocent. A homicide case takes six years to conclude, with the victim's family experiencing each delay as renewed grief and courts granting stays of proceedings because delay itself violated the accused's constitutional rights. Criminal court backlogs have grown so severe that cases routinely take years to resolve, destroying evidence, traumatizing participants, and undermining public confidence in whether the system can deliver justice at all. Whether these delays represent catastrophic failure requiring emergency intervention or inevitable complexity of proper criminal process divides those experiencing the crisis from those managing it.
The Case for Delays as System Failure
Advocates argue that years-long waits for criminal trials deny justice to everyone involved. Victims experience secondary trauma from repeated postponements, lose faith in the system meant to vindicate their suffering, and sometimes cannot proceed when witnesses have moved, memories have faded, or their own capacity to testify has been eroded by time. For those wrongly accused, years of uncertainty with charges hanging over them destroys lives even if they are ultimately acquitted. Those held pretrial experience punishment without conviction, undermining presumption of innocence. Even guilty individuals face unjust consequences when sentences imposed years after offenses bear little relationship to rehabilitation or deterrence. From this view, the Jordan decision establishing reasonable time limits for criminal trials recognized what victims and accused already knew: delay itself is injustice. The solution requires massive investment in criminal courts: more judges, more Crown prosecutors, more public defenders, more court staff, more courtrooms. Backlogs did not appear overnight and will not disappear without sustained funding and political will to treat timely justice as non-negotiable.
The Case for Complexity and Rights Protection
Others argue that criminal trials cannot be rushed without compromising fairness and thoroughness. Proper investigation takes time. Disclosure of evidence to defense requires review of thousands of pages of documents in complex cases. Defense counsel need adequate preparation time. Expert witnesses have limited availability. Some delays result from legitimate Charter applications, preliminary inquiries, and other processes that protect accused persons' rights. From this perspective, speeding up criminal courts risks wrongful convictions, inadequate defense, and procedural shortcuts that advantage the state over individuals facing prosecution. While current delays are problematic, the solution is not necessarily more resources but better case management: triaging serious cases for priority, encouraging early guilty pleas through fair plea negotiations, diverting appropriate cases from the system entirely, and ensuring all parties use time efficiently rather than strategic delay. Moreover, some delays result from factors beyond court control: police investigations, mental health assessments, waiting for complainants to be ready to testify. No amount of court resources eliminates these realities.
The COVID Crisis Amplification
Backlogs that were serious before COVID-19 became catastrophic after. Trials stopped entirely during lockdowns. When courts reopened, jury trials remained impossible or severely limited due to physical distancing requirements and public health orders. Cases scheduled for 2020 may not be heard until 2027 or beyond in some jurisdictions. Accused persons have spent years in pretrial detention waiting for trials that keep being postponed. Victims have given up on seeing cases proceed. New charges continue arriving daily while the backlog of old cases grows. Whether COVID revealed fundamental system fragility or created unprecedented circumstances no system could handle shapes the debate about solutions. But the magnitude of current backlogs suggests that without transformative change, clearing them could take decades, during which more cases will be stayed for unreasonable delay and public faith in criminal justice will continue eroding.
The Question
If criminal cases routinely take years to resolve, with victims unable to get closure and accused persons suffering punishment before conviction, has the system failed so fundamentally that legitimacy itself is at stake? Can investing in more judges, prosecutors, and defenders actually clear backlogs, or do structural problems require rethinking how criminal justice functions entirely? And when speeding up proceedings risks compromising the thorough process that prevents wrongful conviction while current delays themselves deny justice, which value should the system prioritize when it cannot deliver both?