Judge rules feds violated speedy trial rights, dismisses firearms indictment
A federal judge dismissed a gun charge against a repeat offender, ruling prosecutors violated his right to a speedy trial after he spent more than six months in jail
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
A judge dismissed the latest charges against a Minneapolis man with a long criminal history because federal prosecutors missed deadlines.
A grand jury indicted Tavon Timberlake in June for possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Timberlake, 46, sat in jail for more than six months before Judge David Doty ruled that the government violated Timberlake’s right to a speedy trial.
Timberlake was known to law enforcement for many years. In November of 2010, he pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm. Timberlake, whom the FBI said was a member of the Gangster Disciples, already had five convictions for the same thing.
Judge Doty sent Timberlake to federal prison for nearly seven years; he got out on supervised release in 2016. But a few years later, Tiberlake got into trouble for weapons possession, and Judge Susan Richard Nelson sent him back to prison. When he didn’t turn himself to U.S. Marshals as directed, prosecutors charged him with failing to surrender for service of sentence. He pleaded guilty again, and Judge Nancy Brasel sent him to prison for three more years.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
Timberlake got out but pleaded guilty yet again, this time to walking away from a halfway house. In 2023, Brasel gave him another 21 months with three years of supervised release.
Timberlake served his time and got out. Then in June of 2025, police arrested him on allegations of having a gun. A federal grand jury indicted him for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In this latest case, federal prosecutors asked a judge in August to delay Timberlake’s trial, saying they needed time to organize the evidence.
After Timberlake had been in jail for more than six months, his defense attorney Kevin DeVore asked a judge to dismiss the indictment. In a phone interview with MPR News on Tuesday, DeVore said the government violated his client’s right to a speedy trial.
“We filed a motion and said you’re well beyond the Speedy Trial Act time frame,” DeVore said. “You’re supposed to get a trial within 70 days of being indicted or arraigned. And they clearly didn’t do that.”
The dismissal of the charges comes as the U.S. Attorney’s Office is short staffed after many career lawyers resigned over objections to the way the Justice Department responded to the shootings by federal agents of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti.
But DeVore points out that the delays in Timberlake’s case began last summer, before the mass resignations. In his dismissal order, Judge Doty points out that prosecutors failed to comply with a briefing deadline that he set in mid-January.
During a news conference Wednesday to announce federal charges against five people in an unrelated drug trafficking investigation, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Dan Rosen declined to answer specific questions about the Timberlake case. He insisted that his team has the capacity to prosecute the new defendants.
“Our office has all of this bandwidth and more,” Rosen said. “Our office continues to grow. And if you’re a criminal in the city of Minneapolis or the state of Minnesota I recommend that you don’t commit crimes on the assumption that the U.S. Attorney’s Office doesn’t have enough lawyers.”
This was Rosen’s first news conference following his swearing-in in October as Minnesota’s top federal law enforcement officer.
Even though he’s no longer facing charges for gun possession, Timberlake is still being held in the Anoka County Jail for alleged violations of his supervised release.
