United States v. Sabath

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• observing that “juries often find admissions by investigating agents to be dispositive in close cases”
• dismissing arson indictment based on circumstantial evidence where the noninvestigative preindictment delay was unjustified and the defendant was prejudiced, in part, by the unavailability of the principal investigating agent, whose case report was admitted into evidence
• finding combination of “lost evidence, impaired memories of fact witnesses, flawed governmental reports, and deceased key witnesses have combined to plague Defendant with just the kind of concrete and substantial prejudice that the Due Process Clause was designed to remedy”
• “sole witness” no longer had an independent recollection of the key events of the night
• ‘‘The circuits that require a showing of intentional bad faith delay to gain a tactical advantage over the defendant seem to set an impossible threshold for criminal defendants. No defendant can get into the mind of a prosecutor to determine why a case was delayed . . . .’’

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).