There were all kinds of reasons for new delays in Mr. Hooks’s case, Ms. Cohen, the prosecutor, explained to the judge that day in court. The star witness, a street basketball friend of Mr. Hooks’s named Elijah Green, had been shot in the head in a Bronx public housing development a few months earlier. She suggested Mr. Hooks might have been behind the killing. “That is still an ongoing investigation by my office, frankly,” she said. Her office would later say there was no evidence to support that contention.

Ms. Abate, the public defender, said she had been surprised by the prosecutor’s claim. Before he had been killed, Mr. Green had said he would testify for Mr. Hooks — not for the prosecution, she said. He had told her investigator that the police had threatened to charge him with the killing of Jevon Lawyer if he did not implicate Mr. Hooks.

Here — in Mr. Hooks’s 41st month in jail — the delays of the Bronx were noticeably undermining this trial’s chance to get to the truth. If Mr. Green had seen Mr. Hooks fire those shots on Southern Boulevard, the wait had cost the prosecutors their key witness. But if instead Mr. Green had been ready to testify that he had been fed a false story by the police, it was the defense that had lost a key witness.

But that day in June 2012, Ms. Cohen and Judge Oliver had another concern that would keep this case from getting to court. After all, it was summer, when some judges and lawyers think more about time at the beach than clearing dockets.

Ms. Cohen said she would be out of the office for two weeks in late June, according to a transcript. “I will then be out of the office in the latter part of July for multiple days throughout the month. And then, finally, I will be out of the office once again August 17th through September 4.”

In an interview, Ms. Abate said another assistant district attorney had quietly told her that if Judge Oliver had insisted, the case would have been transferred away from Ms. Cohen by the district attorney’s office and tried immediately.