50
Opinion of the Court
have elapsed with no trial. The result is that he will spend several hundred additional days under detainer (which entails certain disabilities, such as disqualification from certain rehabilitative programs, see United States v. Mauro, 436 U. S. 340, 359 (1978)), and will have his trial delayed several hundred days.4 That result is bad, given the intent of the IAD. It is, however, no worse than what regularly occurred before the IAD was adopted, and in any event cannot be entirely avoided by embracing petitioner's view that transmittal to the warden is the measuring event. As we have said, the IAD unquestionably requires delivery, and only after that has occurred can one entertain the possibility of counting the 180 days from the transmittal to the warden. Thus, the careless or malicious warden, under petitioner's interpretation, may be unable to delay commencement of the 180-day period, but can prevent it entirely, by simply failing to forward the request. More importantly, however, the worst-case scenario under petitioner's interpretation produces results that are significantly worse: If, through negligence of the warden, a prisoner's IAD request is delivered to the prosecutor more than 180 days after it was transmitted to the warden, the prosecution will be precluded before the prosecutor even knows it has been requested. It is possible, though by no means certain, that this consequence could be avoided by the receiving state court's invocation of
4 There is no substance to the dissent's assertion that one of the "reason[s] for the IAD's creation" was to prevent the inmate from being "deprived of an opportunity to obtain a sentence to run concurrently with the sentence being served at the time the detainer is filed." Post, at 56, 57 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Since the IAD does not require detainers to be filed, giving a prisoner the opportunity to achieve concurrent sentencing on outstanding offenses is obviously an accidental consequence of the scheme rather than its objective. Moreover, we are unaware of any studies showing that judges willing to impose concurrent sentences are not willing (in the same circumstances) to credit out-of-state time. If they are (as they logically should be), the opportunity of obtaining a concurrent sentence would ordinarily have zero value.
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