Georgia’s highest court is instructing judges, lawyers and others to come up with a rule to prevent unnecessary delays in the criminal appeals process after seeing many cases that languished for 10 years or longer.

The rare directive from the Georgia Supreme Court came Monday in an opinion on an appeal that took nearly two decades to reach the high court. Margie Owens was convicted in June 1998 and sentenced to serve life in prison for killing her husband. It took eight years for her motion for a new trial to be heard and denied. Then it took 11 more years for her appeal to get to the state Supreme Court.

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