Turkish Appeals Bottleneck Leads to Long Prison Terms ISTANBUL - Cahit Akcam was a university student when he was put on trial for his life in 1982. The case was still dragging on when his son was born in 1993. Today, the boy is a university student himself, and Mr. Akcam is still on trial. "Imagine what it is like to live all your grown life under the constant threat of execution or life imprisonment," Mr. Akcam, 55, said by telephone last week from Ankara, where he works as an editor in a publishing house. Arrested as a leftist after the 1980 military coup, Mr. Akcam was charged in an emergency-rule court in 1982 with having attempted to overthrow the constitutional order, tried along with 722 other people accused of being members of the outlawed Devrimci Yol, or Revolutionary Path, movement. Thirty years later, 21 defendants are still on trial. The others have been acquitted, served their prison terms or died. Mr. Akcam, who spent much of the 1980s imprisoned pending the outcome of his trial, was sentenced along with his remaining co-defendants to hang, in a ruling in July 2002, just 17 days before Turkey abolished its death penalty. His sentence was subsequently converted to life imprisonment and his case has since been working its way through the appeals system. At a hearing in Ankara next Wednesday, the Court of Appeals is expected to rule on a defense petition to drop the case because the 30-year statute of limitations for the charge has expired. "I am hopeful that the court will concur," a defense lawyer, Mehdi Bektas, said by telephone last week, adding that he longed to be unburdened of a case he has handled from the start, representing more defendants than he could recall on the spur of the moment. The case, known as the Dev Yol trial, is only the latest to highlight what many consider the excruciatingly slow pace of justice in Turkey. "There are some long-standing, systemic dysfunctions in the Turkish justice system adversely affecting the enjoyment of human rights and freedoms," Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, said in a statement issued after a recent visit to Turkey. He pointed in particular to "excessively lengthy judicial proceedings." Complaints about the length of trials top the list of verdicts against Turkey by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, with more violations of the right to trial within a reasonable time than any other country, according to figures published by the court. The European court's rebukes have so far made little difference. Several of the defendants in the Dev Yol case won complaints in Strasbourg as far back as the 1990s, and complaints by at least one defendant, Yasar Kanbulut, about the violation of his right to trial within a reasonable time, were upheld in Strasbourg twice, in 2001 and in 2008. "But Turkey simply pays the fine and continues proceedings," Mr. Akcam said. The problem is compounded by the length of detention pending a verdict, which was only recently capped at 5 years for criminal counts and 10 years for political charges. Among the 130,000 inmates of Turkish prisons, only 75,000 are serving final sentences, according to the Department of Prisons. The rest are being held pending trial or appeals. While Mr. Akcam was released from prison in 1988 as his trial continued, others have been behind bars far longer. Among those released from detention when the more stringent time limits took effect last year were two men who had spent nearly 15 years behind bars awaiting the outcome of their trial for membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers" Party, or P.K.K.. Two weeks after their release, the Appeals Court threw out the charges against them on grounds of an insufficient investigation. The Appeals Court has long been a bottleneck in the judicial process, with hundreds of thousands of new cases piling onto its caseload every year. According to figures provided by the court, judges entered the year 2010 with a backlog of 453,855 cases and, after frantic work carried 536,314 cases over into 2011. But in this flood of cases, the tide may be beginning to turn.