Killing Time: The Challenges of Reforming Unreasonable Trial Delay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bringing those accused of crimes to trial within a reasonable time after charge is a central tenet of the adversarial criminal justice system. Despite this, New South Wales criminal courts have grappled with increasing long trial wait times since at least 2012. Notwithstanding numerous reforms aimed at reducing the time from charge to trial, the issue is not abating. This thesis interrogates the vexed issue of increasing trial wait times, and the remedies implemented to reduce them. It addresses three questions: (a) what constitutes ‘unreasonable’ trial delay in the criminal law context; (b) what features of the law and criminal law practice make unreasonable criminal trial delay difficult to reverse; and (c) how have the reforms in New South Wales, Australia, aimed at reducing criminal trial delay, impacted on the administration of criminal justice. I explore these questions by examining two drivers of reform: judicial reform within the common law system of precedent and legislative reform. In both contexts, I employ comparative and doctrinal methodologies. The first part of the thesis compares the Australian common law governing unreasonable trial delay with the Canadian common law which sets specific demands on stakeholders to reduce delay. Additionally, law reform in England and Wales offer food for thought on addressing delay. Through these comparisons I explore the role of legal culture in the form of courts’, lawyers’, and judges’ embedded assumptions about remedies where a challenge is made over procedural delays, and about when trial delay is unreasonable. In addition, I explore NSW policies and recent law reform initiatives through the lens of New Public Management. This focuses on legislative reforms that follow English and Welsh models directed to stimulating negotiated guilty pleas. These legislative reforms raise issues regarding the significance of a legislative framework that provokes a shift in the customary roles of judicial officers, prosecutors and defence counsel, and on the compromise, in the pursuit of efficiency, of the accused person’s traditional accusatorial safeguards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.135 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".