In the United States, you are guaranteed a right to speedy trial
by a jury of your peers through the 6th Amendment. However, because the court system is so
clogged with cases in the modern United States, "speedy" is a relative term. Often times, you
may wait for a year or more before your case can come to trial, even though that is the next
available court date when you were first arraigned. So the government is meeting the letter of
the amendment, if not the spirit.
The Patriot Act, passed after the
9/11 attacks, also allows the US government to arrest and detain any individual, citizen or not,
without due process, which means no access to an attorney, no formal charge, not even public
notification of detention are required. While this power has rarely been used against US
citizens (that we know of), it is nevertheless a clear violation of the 6th Amendment's right to
a speedy trial. Some suspects have been held for over nine years in Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray
Prison without even being charged.
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