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The Speedy Trial Act is a federal law that gives the government 70 days from the date of indictment to bring you to trial. That is not a guideline. It is a hard legal deadline. If the government misses it — even by one day — the charges against you must be dismissed. If you were already convicted, the conviction can be vacated. Thrown out entirely. Not reduced. Not reconsidered. Gone.

Most people sitting in a federal holding facility had no idea this clock existed. They just knew they had been waiting — months, sometimes well over a year — and nobody was telling them why. What many of them did not know was that someone in that courthouse may have been quietly stopping the clock on their behalf, without their knowledge, using a tool called an excludable time stamp.

An excludable time stamp is a docket entry that pauses the Speedy Trial clock. Certain exclusions are legitimate — time spent on pretrial motions, competency evaluations, and similar proceedings. But the stamp became something else entirely in courthouses where oversight was weak. A clerk or a judge could enter an XT exclusion into the docket and the clock would stop. Do it enough times, and a defendant could be held for years without the government ever technically violating the Act. The defendant sat in a cell. The clock sat at zero. And nobody on the outside was watching.

In 2006, the United States Supreme Court put a stop to it. In Zedner v. United States, 547 U.S. 489 (2006), the Court held that these exclusions must be properly justified and entered into the record at the time they are granted — not manufactured after the fact to cover a violation that has already occurred. A court cannot look back at a blown deadline and retroactively stamp the time as excluded to make the problem disappear. The exclusion has to be real, documented, and contemporaneous. If it was not done correctly the first time, it cannot be fixed later. The violation stands.

The Myers case documents exactly this pattern in the Southern District of Illinois. The docket contains excludable time entries that do not align with the underlying record — entries that appear to have been inserted to paper over a Speedy Trial clock that had already run out. Myers does not accuse any single individual of being solely responsible. What the record shows is a pattern. And a pattern in one case raises an unavoidable question: how many other cases in this district were handled the same way?

If you were a federal defendant and you spent what felt like an unreasonable amount of time in custody before trial — if you were never clearly told why your case kept getting delayed — it is worth asking your attorney to pull your docket and count the days. Count the actual days between your indictment and your trial date. Then look at every XT exclusion entered in your record and ask whether it was properly supported at the time it was entered. If the math does not add up, you may have grounds to challenge your conviction under the Speedy Trial Act. Zedner is the law. One violation is enough.