People ask me some version of this constantly: it's been months, sometimes over a year, and their case still hasn't gone anywhere. They want to know if there's a law that forces it to move. There is. Almost nobody explains it correctly, because almost nobody explains what it actually measures.

What CPL 30.30 actually measures

Criminal Procedure Law § 30.30 is New York's statutory speedy trial rule. It does not require the case to go to trial by a certain date. It requires the prosecution to be ready for trial within a set window after the criminal action starts. That distinction is the whole thing people get wrong. "Ready for trial" and "actually went to trial" are not the same event, and the clock only tracks the first one.

The statutory windows, based on the highest charge in the case, are:

  • Six months if at least one charge is a felony.
  • Ninety days if the top charge is a misdemeanor punishable by more than three months in jail.
  • Sixty days if the top charge is a misdemeanor punishable by three months or less.
  • Thirty days if the top charge is only a violation.

If the prosecution has not validly stated readiness within that window, the case can be dismissed on motion under CPL 30.30. That's a real tool. It's also narrower than it sounds.

The clock stops for more reasons than most people expect

CPL 30.30(4) excludes entire categories of time from the count: pretrial motions and the time a court spends deciding them, competency proceedings, delays the defense requested or agreed to, time a defendant is absent or has fled, and periods tied to a co-defendant's case, among others. A case that looks like it's been open for fourteen months on the calendar might have a legal 30.30 clock of far less than that, once excludable time gets subtracted. Nobody adds this up for a defendant automatically. It has to be calculated, and it has to be calculated correctly.

Discovery compliance changed how the clock gets stopped

Since New York's 2020 discovery reform, a prosecutor's statement of readiness generally isn't valid unless it's backed by a proper Certificate of Compliance under CPL Article 245, confirming the required evidence was actually turned over. If that certificate is later found invalid because the prosecution didn't exercise due diligence, the court can treat the readiness statement as invalid too, which directly affects the 30.30 calculation. We cover what discovery reform did and didn't fix for defendants in a companion piece on what falls through the cracks after an arrest, including the sharp rise in speedy trial dismissals that followed.

Why this is a calculation, not a countdown app

Every one of those exclusions has to be argued, documented, and checked against the court file. This is precisely the kind of task that gets missed when an attorney is carrying a heavy caseload, not because anyone is careless on purpose, but because tracking excludable time on every open file takes real hours nobody budgeted. Reading the raw calendar date is not the same as knowing the actual legal deadline.

The exact question to ask

Ask your attorney directly: "What is the actual CPL 30.30 date on my case right now, after excludable time, and can I see how you calculated it?" If the answer is vague, or if nobody has run the calculation recently, that's the sign to ask again, in writing, before assuming the case is simply moving at its own pace.

A deadline that exists on paper only protects you if someone is actually tracking it and telling you what it means, in real time, not after the fact. Don't wait for your case to feel unusually long before you ask where the 30.30 clock actually stands. Ask early, and ask again at every court date.