Background
Andrew Wayne Lochetto was convicted in Montgomery County of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a victim under 16, indecent assault of a victim under 13, and endangering the welfare of a child. The charges involved alleged sexual abuse of his daughters between 2015 and 2021. Before trial, Lochetto sought dismissal under Pennsylvania Rule of Criminal Procedure 600, contending that the Commonwealth failed to bring him to trial within the required period.
Rule 600 generally requires trial to begin within 365 days after a criminal complaint is filed, but the mechanical count is not the end of the analysis. Periods attributable to a defendant’s unavailability may be excluded if the Commonwealth exercised due diligence. Due diligence does not demand perfect police work or every conceivable investigative step; it requires reasonable efforts under the circumstances.
The dispute centered on the interval between filing the complaint and Lochetto’s arrest. Police repeatedly tried to find him through known addresses, telephone contacts, law-enforcement databases, relatives, and other investigative channels. Lochetto argued that the officers could have done more and compared his case to decisions finding insufficient diligence after only isolated or superficial attempts to serve or arrest a defendant.
The Court’s Holding
The Superior Court affirmed the judgment of sentence and upheld denial of the Rule 600 motion. Judge Bender concluded that the Commonwealth proved by a preponderance of the evidence that police made reasonable and sustained efforts to apprehend Lochetto. Because those efforts met the due-diligence standard, the period in which he could not be located was excluded from the Rule 600 calculation.
The trial court’s findings mattered because appellate review of a Rule 600 ruling asks whether the lower court abused its discretion, considering the record in the light most favorable to the prevailing party. The Superior Court did not reweigh the search evidence from scratch. It examined whether the findings had record support and whether the trial court applied the correct legal measure of reasonable diligence.
The panel rejected an approach based on hindsight. The question was not whether counsel could identify another tactic after the fact, but whether the officers’ activity, viewed as it unfolded, represented a reasonable attempt to locate the accused. The record showed substantially more than the minimal conduct found inadequate in the cases Lochetto cited. Those precedents involved circumstances such as only two visits to an address when police had no basis to believe the defendant lived elsewhere.
Once the unavailable period was removed, the Commonwealth commenced trial within the adjusted deadline. The court therefore found no abuse of discretion in the trial court’s factual assessment or its refusal to dismiss the prosecution. The decision did not create a checklist of mandatory investigative steps; it applied the established totality-of-the-circumstances test to the documented search efforts.
Key Takeaways
- Rule 600 calculations distinguish the mechanical run date from an adjusted date that excludes qualifying periods of defendant unavailability.
- The Commonwealth bears the burden of proving due diligence by a preponderance of the evidence.
- Due diligence requires reasonable, sustained efforts, not proof that police pursued every imaginable lead.
- Courts evaluate police activity in its real-time context and will not use hindsight alone to declare an otherwise reasonable search inadequate.
Why It Matters
Lochetto shows why Rule 600 litigation is usually won or lost through a dated record of investigative activity. Prosecutors should preserve address checks, database searches, attempted calls, contacts with relatives, warrant activity, and the information officers possessed at each stage. A generalized statement that police “looked for” the accused is less persuasive than a chronology connecting each step to the next available lead.
The constitutional speedy-trial inquiry and Rule 600 analysis are related but distinct. Rule 600 supplies Pennsylvania’s procedural calculation and remedies, including dismissal when its requirements are met, while constitutional claims use a separate balancing framework. Lawyers should identify which protection they invoke and should not assume that delay alone establishes a Rule 600 violation after exclusions are applied.
Defense counsel should still test whether activity was sustained, whether unexplored information was readily available, and whether long gaps lack explanation. The opinion does not excuse inactivity simply because an arrest eventually occurred. It holds that this particular record demonstrated reasonable effort. For trial courts, the safest approach is to identify the mechanical run date, assign each disputed interval, make explicit diligence findings, and calculate the adjusted deadline on the record.