First conviction, not arrest, started speedy trial clock 

A murder conviction handed down to a man whose first conviction had been overturned on appeal more than three years earlier didn’t violate the defendant’s right to a speedy trial because the trial judge properly looked back only to the time since the first conviction was overturned and not the 15 years that had elapsed since the man was first arrested, the South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled in a case of first impression, affirming a 2020 ruling by the state’s Court of Appeals. 

The Supreme Court slightly modified the reasoning behind the ruling, holding that the defendant shouldn’t have been penalized because his preferred attorney was under an order of protection due to his role in another high-profile murder trial at the time. 

Steven Barnes was arrested in 2002 and accused of killing a teenager in Edgefield. Because Barnes was already incarcerated in Georgia for other crimes, he wasn’t extradited to South Carolina until 2005, and it wasn’t until 2010 that he was finally tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. 

In 2014, the state’s Supreme Court reversed the conviction because Barnes had been improperly denied his right to self-representation. After failing to persuade the court to reconsider, prosecutors sought to re-try Barnes in 2017, at which point Barnes sought to have the charges dismissed, arguing that the state had violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial. Barnes argued that the applicable period of delay began with the issuing of his arrest warrant, while prosecutors argued that the clock started only after Barnes’ conviction was overturned since he’d waived his speedy trial rights during his first trial. 

Edgefield County Circuit Court Judge Diane Schafer Goodstein noted that the assertion of speedy trial rights after a conviction has been entered and then overturned on appeal was a novel legal issue in South Carolina. Goodstein agreed with prosecutors that the speedy trial analysis began from when the case was remitted to the circuit court in 2014, and found that Barnes’ speedy trial rights hadn’t been violated. Barnes was tried and convicted again, but sentenced to life in prison this time, and appealed again. 

In 2020 the Court of Appeals agreed that with prosecutors and Goodstein that the period for analysis didn’t begin until 2014, and that Barnes’ rights hadn’t been violated by undue delay. After conducting a survey of other jurisdictions that have addressed the issue, the appeals court found that courts in other states generally measure the period of delay from the date the case was remitted from the appellate courts when conducting a speedy trial analysis in a retrial following the reversal of a defendant’s conviction. 

But because the three-and-a-half-year delay between the case being remitted to the circuit court and Barnes actually coming up for his second trial was itself presumptively prejudicial, the appeals court still needed to consider Barnes’ speedy trial argument. It found that Barnes himself was responsible for 16 months’ worth of the delay. The remaining two-plus years were attributable to the state, mostly due to its unsuccessful efforts to have Barnes’ initial conviction reinstated, but this further appeal wasn’t taken in bad faith or for the purposes of delay, and so it wasn’t weighed heavily against the state. 

The Supreme Court granted review to address one narrow point in the Court of Appeals’ discussion of one factor in its speedy trial analysis—the reason for the delay. The court dispensed with briefing and affirmed the Court of Appeals’ ruling as modified in a Feb. 2 unsigned opinion. 

In this factor of the analysis, courts evaluate the reason for each specific period of delay and determine whether the reason weighs against the state, should be considered as neutral or valid, or weighs against the defendant. The Supreme Court focused solely on one specific period of delay the Court of Appeals weighed against Barnes. One of Barnes’s two attorneys, William McGuire, was given an order of protection by the Supreme Court from December 2015 until December 2016 due to his ongoing participation in the trial of the man who killed nine people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. 

While the Supreme Court agreed that this period of delay shouldn’t be attributed to the state, it overruled the Court of Appeals’ decision that it must be attributed to Barnes, since Barnes was entitled to his choice of counsel. 

“McGuire did not fail to act on Barnes, behalf; rather, he was under an order of protection that authorized him to focus on his representation of another client, presumably so the other client’s case could be brought to trial in a timely manner,” the court’s opinion reads. “Additionally, during this period the State was still seeking the death penalty against Barnes. The State did not withdraw its notice of intent to seek the death penalty until July 2017. Barnes was entitled to keep his lawyer, even though doing so delayed his trial. This specific period of delay should be weighed as neutral or valid.” 

The four-page decision is State v. Barnes (Lawyers Weekly No. 010-004-22). The full text of the opinion is available online at sclawyersweekly.com. 

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