Orange Math Bad

the judges are dragging their feet!

Brief follow-up on yesterday’s post so I can impose dangerous and evil facts on a wonderfully progressive narrative. The law professor and former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, joining a chorus of other slogan-chanters, charges that District Court Judge Aileen Cannon is deliberately slowing the pace of the proceedings over Trump’s alleged possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

She is, the theory goes, doing this to help Trump, because she’s on his side, and willful delay and obstruction is judicial misconduct: “Cannon has repeatedly indulged silly arguments from Team Trump while eating up weeks and months that prosecutors — and voters — don’t have.” A fair judge would have gotten Trump convicted right away without a bunch of procedural whatever, to tell the voters not to vote for him, which is how an honest criminal justice system behaves. Slow court for Trump, corruption; fast court for Trump, honesty. If a federal judge is moving slowly in a criminal case, that’s a sign that something is wrong!

The problem with this claim is that it’s remarkably easy to check, and the former federal prosecutor Harry Litman knows this.

Hmm, median time from commencement to termination for felony defendants — it turns out that the courts measure this. Let’s have a look!

The national median for the disposition of felonies by jury trial in the federal courts is 26.1 months — over two years.

You can find a timeline here. Donald Trump was first indicted in the Mar-a-Lago case on June 8, 2023, with a superseding indictment filed on July 27, 2023. So in July of this year, we’ll reach the one-year mark, in a country where felony trials in federal courts usually take over two years. Clearly Aileen Cannon is dragging her feet, right? If Trump’s jury delivered a verdict around September of 2025, the disposition of his case would be…normal.

Of course, this is the median for all federal trials, including trials for drug dealers arrested by the DEA with the drugs in the trunk of their car and bank robbers arrested by the FBI with their fingerprints on the counter in front of the teller. A complex case of first impression — the first former President of the United States ever arrested for possession of government documents — should be a little harder and a little slower.

The federal courts in Florida tend to move a little faster than the national average:

But again, even by this definition of normal, Cannon’s handling of Trump’s case is within the boundaries.

I went looking for these statistics today because of a profile of Cannon that includes this comparison:

Trump’s critics seem especially concerned that unlike Chutkan – who has rushed proceedings in Washington, where she set a rare seven-month timetable between indictment and trial – Cannon might delay the trial past the fall election.

So Trump’s critics are very concerned that Cannon isn’t rushing criminal proceedings against a political candidate, like the more responsible Judge Chutkan, who is trying to build her court schedule around the political calendar to ensure that the leading opposition figure takes damage before voters go to the polls.

This is what happens when the commentariat is disproportionately made up of mindless apparatchiks who have no difficulty conforming their opinions to the needs of the party. Harry Litman knows how quickly the federal courts move, and he knows that Cannon’s handling of Trump’s case isn’t unusually slow. He’s just a whore, so he’s willing to pretend.