Waiting (and waiting) in Pretrial Confinement

Well, the Navy case of Lieutenant Commander Edward Lin is obviously shaping up to be super interesting in a number of ways.  Espionage charges tend to be.  With Lin's family setting up a webpage to have their say in the public arena, it may be tough to pick out their legitimate points from their bogus ones. 

For instance, they state "[t]he government immediately imprisoned Eddy for more than two months before even preferring court-martial charges."  They then state he has stayed in confinement for months after charges were preferred.  Implied in the original statement is that two months is a long time to wait for preferral after an accused military member is placed into pretrial confinement.  Reality, unfortunately, is that two months is lightning quick in the glacially paced military justice system, especially in a high visibility and likely complex case such as this one. 

The Navy Times just wrote about this family website, and offered a response to the issue of pretrial confinement.  Citing the Marine's official website as the source, they state "a military member can be confined pretrial so long as the member is considered a flight risk or is likely to commit a serious offense if he or she is released."  That is quite an inaccurate assertion (I did not see the source material to see if this was just a bad translation by the Navy Times or whether the Marines actually posted such a statement).  Either way...pretty rough.  There are a number of other pieces to the pretrial confinement process, including the fact that if any lesser degree of restraint (such as house arrest) is adequate to contain the flight risk and/or the likelihood of additional serious misconduct, then pretrial confinement is illegal. 

More importantly to Lin's family website implication that he has been confined too long, the Navy cannot just hold him indefinitely in confinement.  Under Article 10 of the UCMJ the Navy must act to move the case forward to trial with reasonably diligence (especially if Lin has demanded a speedy trial).  And of course the Sixth Amendment's right to a speedy trial exists as well.  At some point, if the Navy cannot show they are working hard at getting this case prosecuted while the accused sits in jail waiting for his day in court, Lin could be ordered out of confinement or the case could even get dismissed.