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NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
preliminary print of the United States Reports.  Readers are requested to
notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Wash-
ington, D.C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that
corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
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No. 90-857
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MARC GILBERT DOGGETT, PETITIONER v. UNITED
STATES
on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
appeals for the eleventh circuit
[June 24, 1992]

  Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court.
  In this case we consider whether the delay of 8- years
between petitioner's indictment and arrest violated his
Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.  We hold that it
did.
                            I
  On February 22, 1980, petitioner Marc Doggett was
indicted for conspiring with several others to import and
distribute cocaine.  See 84 Stat. 1265, 1291, as amended, 21
U. S. C. 846, 963.  Douglas Driver, the Drug Enforcement
Administration's principal agent investigating the conspir-
acy, told the United States Marshal's Service that the DEA
would oversee the apprehension of Doggett and his confed-
erates.  On March 18, 1980, two police officers set out under
Driver's orders to arrest Doggett at his parents' house in
Raleigh, North Carolina, only to find that he was not there.
His mother told the officers that he had left for Colombia
four days earlier.
  To catch Doggett on his return to the United States,
Driver sent word of his outstanding arrest warrant to all
United States Customs stations and to a number of law
enforcement organizations.  He also placed Doggett's name
in the Treasury Enforcement Communication System
(TECS), a computer network that helps Customs agents
screen people entering the country, and in the National
Crime Information Center computer system, which serves
similar ends.  The TECS entry expired that September,
however, and Doggett's name vanished from the system.
  In September 1981, Driver found out that Doggett was
under arrest on drug charges in Panama and, thinking that
a formal extradition request would be futile, simply asked
Panama to -expel- Doggett to the United States.  Although
the Panamanian authorities promised to comply when their
own proceedings had run their course, they freed Doggett
the following July and let him go to Colombia, where he
stayed with an aunt for several months.  On September 25,
1982, he passed unhindered through Customs in New York
City and settled down in Virginia.  Since his return to the
United States, he has married, earned a college degree,
found a steady job as a computer operations manager, lived
openly under his own name, and stayed within the law.
  Doggett's travels abroad had not wholly escaped the
Government's notice, however.  In 1982, the American
Embassy in Panama told the State Department of his
departure to Colombia, but that information, for whatever
reason, eluded the DEA, and Agent Driver assumed for
several years that his quarry was still serving time in a
Panamanian prison.  Driver never asked DEA officials in
Panama to check into Doggett's status, and only after his
own fortuitous assignment to that country in 1985 did he
discover Doggett's departure for Colombia.  Driver then
simply assumed Doggett had settled there, and he made no
effort to find out for sure or to track Doggett down, either
abroad or in the United States.  Thus Doggett remained lost
to the American criminal justice system until September
1988, when the Marshal's Service ran a simple credit check
on several thousand people subject to outstanding arrest
warrants and, within minutes, found out where Doggett
lived and worked.  On September 5, 1988, nearly 6 years
after his return to the United States and 8- years after his
indictment, Doggett was arrested.
  He naturally moved to dismiss the indictment, arguing
that the Government's failure to prosecute him earlier
violated his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.  The
Federal Magistrate hearing his motion applied the criteria
for assessing speedy trial claims set out in Barker v. Wingo,
407 U. S. 514 (1972):  -[l]ength of delay, the reason for the
delay, the defendant's assertion of his right, and prejudice
to the defendant.-  Id., at 530 (footnote omitted).  The
Magistrate found that the delay between Doggett's indict-
ment and arrest was long enough to be -presumptively
prejudicial,- Magistrate's Report, reprinted at App. to Pet.
for Cert. 27-28, that the delay -clearly [was] attributable to
the negligence of the government,- id., at 39, and that
Doggett could not be faulted for any delay in asserting his
right to a speedy trial, there being no evidence that he had
known of the charges against him until his arrest, id., at
42-44.  The Magistrate also found, however, that Doggett
had made no affirmative showing that the delay had
impaired his ability to mount a successful defense or had
otherwise prejudiced him.  In his recommendation to the
District Court, the Magistrate contended that this failure to
demonstrate particular prejudice sufficed to defeat Doggett's
speedy trial claim.
  The District Court took the recommendation and denied
Doggett's motion.  Doggett then entered a conditional guilty
plea under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(a)(2),
expressly reserving the right to appeal his ensuing convic-
tion on the speedy trial claim.
  A split panel of the Court of Appeals affirmed.  906 F. 2d
573 (CA11 1990).  Following Circuit precedent, see Ring-
staff v. Howard, 885 F. 2d 1542 (CA11 1989) (en banc), the
court ruled that Doggett could prevail only by proving
-actual prejudice- or by establishing that -the first three
Barker factors weigh[ed] heavily in his favor.-  906 F. 2d, at
582.  The majority agreed with the Magistrate that Doggett
had not shown actual prejudice, and, attributing the
Government's delay to -negligence- rather than -bad faith,-
id., at 578-579, it concluded that Barker's first three factors
did not weigh so heavily against the Government as to
make proof of specific prejudice unnecessary.  Judge Clark
dissented, arguing, among other things, that the majority
had placed undue emphasis on Doggett's inability to prove
actual prejudice.
  We granted Doggett's petition for certiorari, 498 U. S. ---
(1991), and now reverse.
                           II
  The Sixth Amendment guarantees that, -[i]n all criminal
prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a
speedy . . . trial . . . .-  On its face, the Speedy Trial Clause
is written with such breadth that, taken literally, it would
forbid the government to delay the trial of an -accused- for
any reason at all.  Our cases, however, have qualified the
literal sweep of the provision by specifically recognizing the
relevance of four separate enquiries: whether delay before
trial was uncommonly long, whether the government or the
criminal defendant is more to blame for that delay, wheth-
er, in due course, the defendant asserted his right to a
speedy trial, and whether he suffered prejudice as the
delay's result.  See Barker, supra, at 530.
  The first of these is actually a double enquiry.  Simply to
trigger a speedy trial analysis, an accused must allege that
the interval between accusation and trial has crossed the
threshold dividing ordinary from -presumptively prejudi-
cial- delay, 470 U. S., at 530-531, since, by definition, he
cannot complain that the government has denied him a
-speedy- trial if it has, in fact, prosecuted his case with
customary promptness.  If the accused makes this showing,
the court must then consider, as one factor among several,
the extent to which the delay stretches beyond the bare
minimum needed to trigger judicial examination of the
claim.  See id., at 533-534.  This latter enquiry is signifi-
cant to the speedy trial analysis because, as we discuss
below, the presumption that pretrial delay has prejudiced
the accused intensifies over time.  In this case, the extraor-
dinary 8- year lag between Doggett's indictment and
arrest clearly suffices to trigger the speedy trial enquiry;
its further significance within that enquiry will be dealt
with later.
  As for Barker's second criterion, the Government claims
to have sought Doggett with diligence.  The findings of the
courts below are to the contrary, however, and we review
trial court determinations of negligence with considerable
deference.  See Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., 496 U. S.
384, 402 (1990); McAllister v. United States, 348 U. S. 19,
20-22 (1954); 9 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and
Procedure  2590 (1971).  The Government gives us nothing
to gainsay the findings that have come up to us, and we see
nothing fatal to them in the record.  For six years, the
Government's investigators made no serious effort to test
their progressively more questionable assumption that
Doggett was living abroad, and, had they done so, they
could have found him within minutes.  While the Govern-
ment's lethargy may have reflected no more than Doggett's
relative unimportance in the world of drug trafficking, it
was still findable negligence, and the finding stands.
  The Government goes against the record again in
suggesting that Doggett knew of his indictment years before
he was arrested.  Were this true, Barker's third factor, con-
cerning invocation of the right to a speedy trial, would be
weighed heavily against him.  But here again, the Govern-
ment is trying to revisit the facts.  At the hearing on
Doggett's speedy trial motion, it introduced no evidence
challenging the testimony of Doggett's wife, who said that
she did not know of the charges until his arrest, and of his
mother, who claimed not to have told him or anyone else
that the police had come looking for him.  From this the
Magistrate implicitly concluded, Magistrate's Report, re-
printed at App. to Pet. for Cert. 42-44, and the Court of
Appeals expressly reaffirmed, 906 F. 2d, at 579-580, that
Doggett had won the evidentiary battle on this point.  Not
only that, but in the factual basis supporting Doggett's
guilty plea, the Government explicitly conceded that it had
-no information that Doggett was aware of the indict-
ment before he left the United States in March 1980, or
prior to his arrest.  His mother testified at the suppres-
sion hearing that she never told him, and Barnes and
Riddle [Doggett's confederates] state they did not have
contact with him after their arrest [in 1980].-  2
Record, Exh. 63, p. 2.
While one of the Government's lawyers later expressed
amazement that -that particular stipulation is in the
factual basis,- Tr. 13 (March 31, 1989), he could not make
it go away, and the trial and appellate courts were entitled
to accept the defense's unrebutted and largely substantiated
claim of Doggett's ignorance.  Thus, Doggett is not to be
taxed for invoking his speedy trial right only after his
arrest.
                           III
  The Government is left, then, with its principal conten-
tion: that Doggett fails to make out a successful speedy trial
claim because he has not shown precisely how he was
prejudiced by the delay between his indictment and trial.
                            A
  We have observed in prior cases that unreasonable delay
between formal accusation and trial threatens to produce
more than one sort of harm, including -oppressive pretrial
incarceration,- -anxiety and concern of the accused,- and
-the possibility that the [accused's] defense will be im-
paired- by dimming memories and loss of exculpatory
evidence.  Barker, 407 U. S., at 532; see also Smith v.
Hooey, 393 U. S. 374, 377-379 (1969); United States v.
Ewell, 383 U. S. 116, 120 (1966).  Of these forms of preju-
dice, -the most serious is the last, because the inability of
a defendant adequately to prepare his case skews the
fairness of the entire system.-  407 U. S., at 532.  Doggett
claims this kind of prejudice, and there is probably no other
kind that he can claim, since he was subjected neither to
pretrial detention nor, he has successfully contended, to
awareness of unresolved charges against him.
  The Government answers Doggett's claim by citing
language in three cases, United States v. Marion, 404 U. S.
307, 320-323 (1971), United States v. MacDonald, 456 U. S.
1, 8 (1982), and United States v. Loud Hawk, 474 U. S. 302,
312 (1986), for the proposition that the Speedy Trial Clause
does not significantly protect a criminal defendant's interest
in fair adjudication.  In so arguing, the Government asks
us, in effect, to read part of Barker right out of the law, and
that we will not do.  In context, the cited passages support
nothing beyond the principle, which we have independently
based on textual and historical grounds, see Marion, supra,
at 313-320, that the Sixth Amendment right of the accused
to a speedy trial has no application beyond the confines of
a formal criminal prosecution.  Once triggered by arrest,
indictment, or other official accusation, however, the speedy
trial enquiry must weigh the effect of delay on the accused's
defense just as it has to weigh any other form of prejudice
that Barker recognized.  See Moore v. Arizona, 414 U. S.
25, 26-27, and n. 2 (1973); Barker, supra, at 532; Smith,
supra, at 377-79; Ewell, supra, at 120.
  As an alternative to limiting Barker, the Government
claims Doggett has failed to make any affirmative showing
that the delay weakened his ability to raise specific defens-
es, elicit specific testimony, or produce specific items of
evidence.  Though Doggett did indeed come up short in this
respect, the Government's argument takes it only so far:
consideration of prejudice is not limited to the specifically
demonstrable, and, as it concedes, Brief for United States
28, n. 21; Tr. of Oral Arg. 28-34 (Feb. 24, 1992), affirmative
proof of particularized prejudice is not essential to every
speedy trial claim.  See Moore, supra, at 26; Barker, supra,
at 533.  Barker explicitly recognized that impairment of
one's defense is the most difficult form of speedy trial
prejudice to prove because time's erosion of exculpatory
evidence and testimony -can rarely be shown.-  407 U. S.,
at 532.  And though time can tilt the case against either
side, see id., at 521; Loud Hawk, supra, at 315, one cannot
generally be sure which of them it has prejudiced more
severely.  Thus, we generally have to recognize that
excessive delay presumptively compromises the reliability
of a trial in ways that neither party can prove or, for that
matter, identify.  While such presumptive prejudice cannot
alone carry a Sixth Amendment claim without regard to the
other Barker criteria, see Loud Hawk, supra, at 315, it is
part of the mix of relevant facts, and its importance
increases with the length of delay.

                            B
  This brings us to an enquiry into the role that presump-
tive prejudice should play in the disposition of Doggett's
speedy trial claim.  We begin with hypothetical and some-
what easier cases and work our way to this one.
  Our speedy trial standards recognize that pretrial delay
is often both inevitable and wholly justifiable.  The govern-
ment may need time to collect witnesses against the
accused, oppose his pretrial motions, or, if he goes into
hiding, track him down.  We attach great weight to such
considerations when balancing them against the costs of
going forward with a trial whose probative accuracy the
passage of time has begun by degrees to throw into ques-
tion.  See Loud Hawk, supra, at 315-317.  Thus, in this
case, if the Government had pursued Doggett with reason-
able diligence from his indictment to his arrest, his speedy
trial claim would fail.  Indeed, that conclusion would
generally follow as a matter of course however great the
delay, so long as Doggett could not show specific prejudice
to his defense.
  The Government concedes, on the other hand, that
Doggett would prevail if he could show that the Govern-
ment had intentionally held back in its prosecution of him
to gain some impermissible advantage at trial.  See Brief
for United States, 28 n. 21; Tr. of Oral Arg. 28-34 (Feb. 24,
1992).  That we cannot doubt.  Barker stressed that official
bad faith in causing delay will be weighed heavily against
the government, 407 U. S., at 531, and a bad-faith delay the
length of this negligent one would present an overwhelming
case for dismissal.
  Between diligent prosecution and bad-faith delay, official
negligence in bringing an accused to trial occupies the
middle ground.  While not compelling relief in every case
where bad-faith delay would make relief virtually automat-
ic, neither is negligence automatically tolerable simply
because the accused cannot demonstrate exactly how it has
prejudiced him.  It was on this point that the Court of
Appeals erred, and on the facts before us, it was reversible
error.
  Barker made it clear that -different weights [are to be]
assigned to different reasons- for delay.  Ibid.  Although
negligence is obviously to be weighed more lightly than a
deliberate intent to harm the accused's defense, it still falls
on the wrong side of the divide between acceptable and
unacceptable reasons for delaying a criminal prosecution
once it has begun.  And such is the nature of the prejudice
presumed that the weight we assign to official negligence
compounds over time as the presumption of evidentiary
prejudice grows.  Thus, our toleration of such negligence
varies inversely with its protractedness, cf. Arizona v.
Youngblood, 488 U. S. 51 (1988), and its consequent threat
to the fairness of the accused's trial.  Condoning prolonged
and unjustifiable delays in prosecution would both penalize
many defendants for the state's fault and simply encourage
the government to gamble with the interests of criminal
suspects assigned a low prosecutorial priority.  The Govern-
ment, indeed, can hardly complain too loudly, for persistent
neglect in concluding a criminal prosecution indicates an
uncommonly feeble interest in bringing an accused to
justice; the more weight the Government attaches to
securing a conviction, the harder it will try to get it.
  To be sure, to warrant granting relief, negligence unac-
companied by particularized trial prejudice must have
lasted longer than negligence demonstrably causing such
prejudice.  But even so, the Government's egregious persis-
tence in failing to prosecute Doggett is clearly sufficient.
The lag between Doggett's indictment and arrest was 8-
years, and he would have faced trial 6 years earlier than he
did but for the Government's inexcusable oversights.  The
portion of the delay attributable to the Government's
negligence far exceeds the threshold needed to state a
speedy trial claim; indeed, we have called shorter delays
-extraordinary.-  See Barker, supra, at 533.  When the
Government's negligence thus causes delay six times as
long as that generally sufficient to trigger judicial review,
see n. 1, supra, and when the presumption of prejudice,
albeit unspecified, is neither extenuated, as by the defend-
ant's acquiescence, e.g., id., at 534-536, nor persuasively
rebutted, the defendant is entitled to relief.

                           IV
  We reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals and
remand the case for proceedings consistent with this
opinion.
So ordered.