What Have Been the Longest Criminal Court Cases in U.S. History?

On TV’s Law & Order, a single murder—from crime, to investigation, to arrest, trial and verdict—wraps up in a tidy 44 minutes, excluding commercials. But the real-life pursuit of justice, with its mountains of documents, dry legalese and, occasionally, dramatic bombshells, is messy, and, more often than not, a time suck. A three-year study by the National Center for State Courts, published in 2020, found that the average time to dispose of a felony criminal case is a 256 days. And misdemeanors like shoplifting, trespassing and vandalism take an average of 193 days of the judicial system’s time. 

Here are some American criminal cases that set records—and tested patience. 

The sensationally publicized prosecution of the founder of the McMartin Preschool, its administrator and some teachers stands as one of the longest—and most sprawling, expensive and controversial—child abuse trials in American history. 

The saga began in August 1983, when a mother reported to police in Manhattan Beach, Calif., that her 2-year-old son told her he’d been molested by his preschool teacher “Mister Ray.” She said doctors found evidence the boy had been sodomized, and McMartin teacher Ray Buckey was arrested. Police then sent 200 families of McMartin students explicit letters that itemized forms of child molestation, named Buckey as a suspect and directed parents to “question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim.”

A sort of hysteria ensued as a Los Angeles child-therapy center working with police interviewed 400 children and concluded that 360 of them had been abused. Transcripts from the interviews showed therapists, who adopted “believe the children” as their slogan, asking kids arguably leading questions such as, "Can you remember the naked pictures?"

In March 1984, a Los Angeles County grand jury handed down indictments against Ray, his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, his sister and three female teachers. The grand jury also indicted 76-year-old Virginia McMartin, the preschool’s founder—and Ray’s grandmother—even though prosecutors had not sought charges against her. 

In all, the so-called McMartin Seven faced more than 300 counts of rape, sodomy and other abuses on 41 children ranging in age from 2 to 8, according to a Washington Post report at the time. A preliminary hearing alone stretched to 20 months of gripping and grueling testimony, with one 10-year-old boy spending 16 days in the witness chair. But one week after the seven defendants were ordered to stand trial, a new district attorney dropped charges against everyone but Ray and Peggy, citing “incredibly weak evidence.”

After a trial that played out over nearly three years, 63,000 pages of testimony, 917 exhibits, 124 witnesses and nine weeks of jury deliberations, the mother-son pair were acquitted of all but 13 counts, on which the jury deadlocked. 

The protracted case, which the Los Angeles Times called “hastily filed” and “flawed from the beginning,” led authorities nationwide to reassess how child witnesses are questioned and establish new techniques and guidelines dealing with children in abuse cases. 

The initial trial of doctor Sam Sheppard for the 1954 murder of his wife, Marilyn, in their Bay Village, Ohio, home, logged just nine weeks. O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, by way of comparison, lasted more than eight months. However, the Sheppard legal saga dragged on for a total of 12 years, ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Sam was a prominent 30-year-old osteopathic surgeon when 31-year-old Marilyn Sheppard, who was pregnant, was bludgeoned to death in their bed on July 4, 1954. Sam was steadfast in pleading innocence. He told police he wrestled with a “bushy-haired intruder” and was knocked unconscious. At trial, two witnesses testified to seeing a bushy-haired man near the Sheppard home on the day of the murder.  

But also at trial, Sam’s affair with a lab technician was exposed. News coverage of the trial was rabid, particularly in the Cleveland Press, which ran headlines such as “Why Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail” and “Getting Away With Murder”that skewed toward Sam’s alleged guilt. 

Sam’s lawyer filed several motions arguing that the fevered local publicity required that the trial be moved to another county, but each was denied. The jury found Sheppard guilty of second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Sam refused to accept that fate. Through a new lawyer, F. Lee Bailey (who would go on to defend the likes of O.J. Simpson and Patty Hearst), Sam argued for the verdict to be overturned on grounds that the trial judge did nothing to keep prejudicial publicity from endangering his right to a fair trial. 

After 10 years in prison, Sam got the U.S. Supreme Court to agree. In an 8-1 decision issued on June 6, 1966, the high court reversed the murder conviction. Sam was freed from prison and stood trial a second time in October that same year. The jury found him not guilty.  

The media was still not done with Sam: His saga is widely believed to have inspired the 1963 television series The Fugitive, and later, the 1993 movie of the same name.

By the time Angelo Buono Jr. was convicted for the brutal “Hillside Strangler” murders of nine young women in Los Angeles area, his trial set the record for murder trials to date: two years, 400 witnesses, 1,800 exhibits, more than 50,000 pages of testimony and 20 days of sequestered jury deliberations. The serial killings, committed with his cousin, terrorized the city in the late 1970s as the young women’s violated and tortured bodies were discovered on various LA hillsides.

After the verdicts were read on a November day in 1983, reporters asked foreman Edward McKay about his two-year jury duty. “I feel strained and depressed,” he replied, according to UPI.