It’s 4 a.m. and Ralph Berry shakes out of his sleep. He perches on the edge of a bed, shaking, screaming for unnamed people not to hurt him. He’s terrified. In a few minutes, his mother is in the room, holding him down. “It’s OK, Ralph! It’s OK!” she screams. And it’s only then, in a fog of anxiety, that the 21-year-old realizes he’s not in jail any more. He’s at home. Three years of my life I spent in there, that’s three years I’m not getting back, ever - Ralph Berry

The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution says that the “accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial.” But that rings hollow in some parts of the U.S.

The Bronx, where Ralph Berry is from, is an acute example of what is happening to already overwhelmed judicial systems from Louisiana to California and Texas. Defendants, often poor, are routinely denied their right to a speedy trial. Under New York state law, defendants have the right to face trial within 180 days of being arrested. But in the Bronx, a felony defendant can wait up to 1,018 days between indictment and trial — more than double the wait times in wealthier boroughs of New York. Police accused Ralph Berry of murdering a man outside a nightclub in the Bronx in 2010. Berry denied even knowing about the shooting, but that made little difference. After witnesses identified him in a lineup, he was arrested and sent to Riker’s Island jail. A process that should take months dragged on; Berry sat in jail for three years before he was given a trial. He appeared in court over 20 times. “I was so scared,” he says. “I didn’t know how to survive in that sort of world. There be some mean dudes in there … mean dudes.” The cruelest irony is police actually found DNA evidence implicating someone else in the murder, just two days after it happened, records show. But they didn’t hand it to prosecutors, so it was never used in court. A Fusion investigation has found that across the country, citizens — some facing trials for crimes they never committed — are being deprived of their right to a speedy trial. As states slash judicial funding, it’s not just many accused who are suffering. Victims are being forced to wait years to see justice for crimes committed against them or their family members. In more than 15 states, we found people locked up, waiting five years or more for their day in court. Fusion has been unable to find any government or private entity that monitors trial wait times nationally, making it impossible to know how broadly defendants’ rights are being violated. No one tracks and compares wait times for court trials in states around the country. So there is no way of knowing how often states are denying the accused their constitutional right to speedy justice. “If we don’t keep track of the data, we have no idea if we’re respecting citizens’ constitutional rights,” says Alicia Bannon, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice. New York, where Ralph Berry sat for three years in jail, does keep this data. But even monitoring trial wait times did little to limit the time he waited for justice. According to Bannon, good data collection is an essential part of ensuring the proper administration of justice. “Part of investing in our courts should be investing in good data collection,” she says, “so that we’re able to set good benchmarks to see how different states are performing against each other.” The last comprehensive study we found that compared trial wait times state by state was published in 1976. Back then, lawmakers worried about court delays; now it’s an issue that’s practically been forgotten. Fusion found that it’s almost impossible to collect the data. We resorted to calling a sample of individual districts around the country to analyze the state of the system. We found that, even at that level, data is limited. In California, the courts monitor their wait times, and most of their cases are processed within 100 days. Both Illinois and Mississippiprovide general summaries in their annual reports on how long it takes to resolve cases, and it appears most are resolved within 100 days, too.Wisconsin tries a little harder and provides statistical breakdowns on the age of their cases. Arizona has introduced what they call the “Fill The Gap” plan in an attempt to reduce the backlog there. In Maricopa County, administrators are aiming to get 85 percent of cases processed within 180 days. At the moment, 20 percent of accused felons wait more than that for their day in court. But then we found some states — like Alabama, Florida and Georgia — that have no data on how long the accused must wait for trial. Here is a graphic illustrating some of the worst cases we’ve discovered.