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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

"Upcoming criminal trial" implies that there is an upcoming criminal trial, which at this point there is not. The judge referred a criminal complaint for contempt against that witness. The office that received it (presumably some sort of investigative division of the court or law enforcement entity) has to investigate, decide if they want to refer it to a prosecutor, and the prosecutor then has to decide if they want to actually file charges. Then there's a probable cause hearing where a judge determines if there is enough evidence for a trial. Then they set a trial date.

Until a trial date is set there is no upcoming criminal trial.

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Ran out of edit time but this is feature, not a bug, and it's not really something ideological like a lot of this kind of stuff can be.

You don't want courts to be able to decide on Monday that you're going to trial on Tuesday. You don't want courts (or any other entity of the judiciary or law enforcement) to decide that you're going to trial independently and the next step is your trial. Regardless of your political persuasion most people agree that fast and efficient prosecution by the state is a Bad Thing. Slow is good. Lots of hands and eyes involved in the process is good. Justice moves slowly by design.

True, but at the same time, "Justice delayed is justice denied"[1]. An excessively slow justice system means that you need substantially more resources (money, and time living under the uncertainty of the outcome) to deal with it, which is part of why the threat of court action against you from a large corporation (or another entity with deep pockets) is so concerning. I know someone who was in court defending against a civil suit for ten years, and the fact that someone is litigious and able to sue is a much larger threat than it should be.

Sure, there's checks and balances, and those are good, but it's ridiculous when we allow cases to drag on and then normalize it.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_delayed_is_justice_den...>

Yes but the maxim presupposes the existence of an injured party, and that's a little different in the context of civil claims (e.g. your example of the large corporation bringing a civil suit against someone) compared to the state bringing criminal charges against a person. There are intentional roadblocks to the state bringing charges, e.g. the separation of powers I mentioned above, that don't really exist on the civil side.

It's good that there are checks, but the core point remains that nimbleness is required for effectiveness. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm observing that the courts are slow, and that the same logic (slow is good) can indicate that is a good thing, which is why I take issue with general application of the concept without limiting context.

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