The Chicago Sun-Times, citing unnamed sources, reports that the R. Kelly child pornography trial, postponed abruptly last week, will not be held until spring. The case was set for jury selection starting Sept. 17, but the judge in the case on Tuesday announced it would not proceed. It was later reported that the delay was caused by complications after the birth of the lead prosecutor’s child.

The judge, Vincent Gaughan, has been handling the cases of men accused of the so-called Brown’s Chicken Massacre in a Chicago suburb in 1993, in which seven people were killed. The Sun-Times said the Kelly case would go to trial after the trial of the second accused Brown’s Chicken murderer, which is scheduled for Feb. 13 of next year.

That will be the sixth anniversary of the releases of the videotape that shows Kelly having sex with a young woman, whom police have said was a girl of 13 or 14 at the time. For the record, Kelly has said it’s not him on the tape and the girl alleged to be on it, the daughter of an associate of Kelly’s, has said it’s not her.

The Chicago Tribune offered this short profile of the self-denying, workaholic prosecutor who prompted the delay. The implication is that if she needed to delay the trial for medical reasons (the story doesn’t specify what they are), it’s probably legitimate.

The paper also offered this longer takeout examining why the trial has taken so long to begin. There have been medical problems: The judge took a fall off a ladder and broke some bones; Kelly suffered a burst appendix. Kelly’s lawyers have filed some 30 motions, which have delayed the trial consistently; beyond that, his team was allowed to delay the trial further as one of his attorneys worked on some other high-profile Chicago cases, including a former Illinois governor, George Ryan, and newspaper scalawag Conrad Black,.

On that final point, the Tribune reports this:

[F]orcing Kelly to choose another lawyer would have risked reversal on appeal.

“It’s better to try these cases once and have confidence in the outcome, than to press forward and [create] potential error,” said Mark Rotert, a former federal and state prosecutor now in private practice.

To a layman like me, this state of affairs seems to invite abuse; if a lawyer has other commitments, that’s his client’s problem, not the court’s.

The story hints at one other thing that’s more disturbing:

While it is not unheard of for cases at the Criminal Courts Buildings to drag on for this long, those often are more complicated murder cases.

“When something slips for five years, neither party, in my judgment, wants to see this case go to trial,” said Steven Miller, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.

Miller said it was much easier to see why the defense might prefer the case to move slowly, since Kelly could continue to work and make money in the interim.

But “criminal cases, unlike wine, rarely get better with age, if you’re the prosecution,” Miller said. “So the prosecution typically wants to move a case along expeditiously.”

My emphasis; the paper doesn’t examine the implications of this.

The story is a good background on this tangled affair, but it is closer to something that would be appropriate at the two- or three-year mark of a long case. Doesn’t anyone care that he will have been running around free for six years by the time the case goes to trial? Again, the scandal here is that there are at least three well-documented instances of Kelly having sex with under-aged girls. He’s innocent until proven guilty, of course, but shouldn’t there at least be a trial at some point? And as I wrote below, isn’t he in the position to continue to indulge his predilections–recording and touring and having lots of chances to interact with his (young) fans?