I'm sure a large number of cases get dealt with expeditiously, and it's the few that are in the system for years that get all the media attention--but maybe not.
In some places I almost wonder if, for any file that's been in the system for five years, there needs to be a flag on it at some point along the way. We've all heard some of these horror stories of very long periods of time. I'm suggesting something like that for the small percentage of people who have been in limbo, so to speak, for more than five, or seven, or eight years. There's some point where somebody should say, if you've been in the system longer than that, we need to pull it out of the stack and actually make a decision on it.