Is North Carolina the Only State in Which the Prosecutor Controls the Calendar?

I was on a panel about criminal case calendaring yesterday at the Courts Commission. While talking to people in preparation for the event, I kept hearing one thing: that North Carolina is the only state in which the prosecutor controls the calendar. After conducting some research, I don’t think that’s quite right. The prosecutor doesn’t have complete control of the calendar in North Carolina. It’s actually a hybrid system in which the court and the prosecutor share responsibility, with some local variation regarding the degree of control allocated to each actor. The starting point is G.S. 7A-61, which provides that “[t]he district attorney shall prepare the trial dockets.” At one time, that statute and others were interpreted to give the prosecutor nearly complete control over the calendar, subject only to constitutional guarantees such as the right to a speedy trial. That system was challenged in 1992 when two defendants in Durham County brought a civil suit against the district attorney. One claimed that the district attorney “delayed [his] case for the tactical purposes of keeping him in jail . . . and pressuring him into entering a guilty plea.” The other alleged that his case was calendared for trial many times but was never tried, causing defense counsel to “prepare for trial repeatedly” and resulting in inconvenience and expense. Simeon v. Hardin, 339 N.C. 358 (1994). The case eventually reached the state supreme court, which rejected the defendants’ claims that the statutory allocation of calendaring responsibility to the district attorney was [...]