#6th amendment

When Trump sends ICE, the National Guard, and federal troops into a majority-Black city like D.C., that’s not “law and order” — that’s abuse of power. Knowing the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments isn’t optional, it’s survival. Protect your rights, protect your community, protect your future. ✊🏾

It was not unconstitutional according to legal experts. The 6th amendment only applies to criminal cases and the right to face your accuser only applies to witnesses who have testified against you in court, not whistleblowers presenting hearsay evidence outside of court.

The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.

When I was in elementary school and first learning about this amendment, I interpreted “speedy trial” as having a time limit. In other words, I assumed this amendment was put into place in order to prevent people who had not been convicted of a crime from being held in jail for long stretches of time. In theory, this is how the amendment is supposed to work. The 6th Amendment, in addition to acts such as the Speedy Trial Act, are meant to ensure that people are not held in jail while they are presumed to be innocent.

In practice, it doesn’t work this way.

There are a plethora of things that allow people to delay trials. While these policies (such as tolling, in which a defendant requests or agrees to a delay) generally require a defendant’s permission, the reality is that many of these cases simply get swept under the rug or stuck in the system, leading to people spending days, months, or even years in confinement without ever being convicted of a crime.

A well-known and particularly egregious example is that of Jerry Hartfield, a man who spent 35 years in jail awaiting trial. His case was mishandled by officials, which eventually led to him being released over three decades after his initial arrest.

Hartfield is not the only one who has been subjected to extreme amounts of time spent in jail. According to a CalMatters investigation, at least 1,300 people have spent over 3 years in California jails awaiting trial. 332 of these individuals have been waiting for over 5 years. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, about 445,000 non-convicted individuals are currently being held in local jails; about 80% of the local jail population.

While the United States does allow for credit for time served, people are not guaranteed this, meaning a person could in theory spend a significant amount of time in jail and still have to serve the entirety of their sentence. However, there is also the possibility of the person being found innocent after their trial, in which case credit for time served is useless.