That was five years ago; the stop-and-start pretrial hearings for his tribunal since have been so disjointed that, at times, they verge on the absurd.
Pretrial hearings start this fall.
Those are the pivotal questions a jury will face in Mr. Williams's trial, which, after nearly two years of investigation and pretrial sparring, is about to start.
That suit is still moving through the pretrial process; a trial is not expected to start before this summer.
His trial was scheduled to start in February, but it has been delayed indefinitely because of pretrial defense motions.
He was repeatedly shifted between different prosecutors and public defenders, causing the attorneys to have to start over, his mother adds, and sometimes officials didn't even show up to his pretrial hearings, prolonging things still further.
His lawyer, William P. Keane, said after a pretrial hearing Friday that Graham planned to take his case to trial, scheduled to start May 19.
Judge Wood made various rulings during a pretrial hearing yesterday about what evidence can be shown to the jury at a trial scheduled to start April 10 in Manhattan.
While a trial of Mr. Zimmerman, who was charged last week with second degree murder in Mr. Martin's death, will most likely not start for months, if ever — The Sentinel over the weekend reported that most such charges in Florida are settled with a pretrial plea — some in the news media are already predicting blanket coverage by television networks and Web sites.
Last week, their pretrial detention was extended until June, and there is every indication that it will be extended again, with a trial unlikely to start until the fall.
Some Pentagon officials said they expected that pretrial proceedings would last a few months, after which the actual trials before a panel of up to seven military officers might start, perhaps in the late spring or early summer.
