Criminal & Trial Courts

Seventy-two hours and other criminal clocks

A criminal case produces rulings that no appeal can reach in time. A victim is excluded from a hearing that happens on Thursday. A record is sealed before the press can object. A motion to disqualify is denied and the trial starts anyway. By the time a final judgment exists, the moment has passed and the injury cannot be undone. That is the narrow space this section covers.

The clearest rule is statutory. The Crime Victims' Rights Act requires a victim to assert the right by motion in the district court, and 18 U.S.C. § 3771(d)(3) then routes a denial to the court of appeals by writ of mandamus, which shall take up and decide the application within 72 hours after filing. No other federal mandamus route carries a deadline like it. Everything else in this section runs on ordinary doctrine: judicial disqualification under 28 U.S.C. § 455 reaches review by writ because the denial is not otherwise appealable, and the governing standard remains the one from Will v. United States, 389 U.S. 90 (1967), which reserves the remedy for exceptional circumstances amounting to a judicial usurpation of power. Order of operations matters as well: a detention order goes first to the district court under 18 U.S.C. § 3145, not to a writ. Grand jury secrecy questions arise under Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(e), and the charging power preserved by Fed. R. Crim. P. 48(a) marks the outer edge of what any court can order. There is also no criminal counterpart to the certified interlocutory appeal of 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b), whose text reaches civil actions only, which is part of why the writ carries the weight it does here.

This section does not deal with attacks on a conviction or a sentence. Those run through direct appeal and post-conviction remedies, and the boundary between them and the writ is drawn in Comparisons. Civil privilege and discovery orders, which share the same appealability problem, are in Discovery, Privilege & Transfer. The elements every petition must satisfy before any of this becomes relevant are in Foundations.