Background
A masked man armed with a knife robbed a Janesville gas-station employee in November 2018 and fled in a green SUV. Police found a stolen green SUV about three hours later with the employee’s purse, a knife, clothing, and several cell phones inside. Blood DNA on a hat and coat matched Jordan Hawkins, who acknowledged the clothing was his. A phone in the SUV contained messages addressed to “Jordan” and a Facebook profile bearing Hawkins’ photograph; identifiable fingerprints on the knife were Hawkins’.
The State charged Hawkins in September 2019. He was serving a revocation sentence and facing a separate Rock County prosecution, and he consistently sought to have that companion case tried first. After that trial concluded in February 2023, Hawkins was tried in this case in August 2023 and convicted of robbery by use of force with a dangerous weapon, as a repeater.
The Court’s Holding
The court held that the 1,426-day delay from charging to trial did not violate Hawkins’ constitutional speedy-trial right. Although the delay was presumptively prejudicial, only 147 days of neutral court-congestion delay weighed against the State, and only slightly. Much of the rest resulted from pandemic conditions, ordinary proceedings, or defense-related decisions in the companion case that Hawkins wanted tried first.
Hawkins’ assertions of the right and the lost possibility of concurrent sentencing weighed only modestly in his favor. He did not unequivocally demand a prompt trial in this case until shortly before trial, his companion-case sentence mitigated potential concurrent-sentence prejudice, and he identified no impairment to his ability to defend the case.
The court also upheld reconsideration of the initial suppression ruling on the phone evidence because the circuit court had authority to revisit a nonfinal ruling and reasonably concluded it had misread controlling Supreme Court precedent. Finally, it held that the State complied with Wisconsin’s discovery statute: the fingerprint report did not exist until the crime laboratory performed the analysis, and the State promptly disclosed it and the analyst after receiving the results, twenty-seven days before trial.
Key Takeaways
- A lengthy pretrial delay alone does not establish a speedy-trial violation; the Barker factors must be balanced in context.
- Delay caused by defense decisions in a companion case may be attributed to the defendant when the defendant requested that the present case follow that case.
- Wisconsin discovery rules require disclosure of evidence in the State’s possession or control, but do not require forensic testing to be performed by a particular time.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates that pandemic closures, defense-requested continuances, and companion-case scheduling can substantially affect the speedy-trial analysis. It also confirms that a trial court may correct a nonfinal suppression ruling when it determines that it applied controlling law incorrectly.
For discovery disputes, the opinion distinguishes late disclosure of existing evidence from evidence generated through newly performed testing. The practical question remains whether the defense received the new material soon enough to use it effectively at trial.