Breaking News: candidates for Kanawha County Prosecuting Attorney Want to Reduce Dismissals

This breaking news was reported in the Charleston Daily Mail today. Reportedly, both candidates for Kanawha County Prosecuting Attorney want to reduce the number of dismissals in their county due to West Virginia’s one-year-out-from-indictment-and-the-case-is-dismissed rule. As they say, shoot for the stars….

Geez, I’ve got to start taking more cases in Kanawha County.

There are lots of excuses for this, such as too many cases and too little funding. However, as Rudyard Kipling said, “there are forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” Having worked as a prosecutor in an office that had a caseload that was many times larger than Kanawha County’s, I can’t remember one case ever getting dismissed based solely on neglect. Heck, we sometimes went through a thousand cases a day. I guess that if you wanted to set up a system that couldn’t manage the caseload, you could do it. And apparently Kanawha County has done it. The tough part is making it work. But that should be the status quo, not some great achievement.

– John H. Bryan, West Virginia Attorney