12 practices- have filled this niche with devotion regarding the statement of the accomplice, of the fellow traveler along the road of crime, of the informant who seeks exoneration from liability or exemption from punishment by throwing the former or directing the latter toward another person, who may be guilty or innocent. It would be best if the conviction that the co-perpetrator’s testimony, in itself, is insufficient, spread and became the rule. 52. Article 108 of the Criminal Procedures Code in force in the State when the facts took place, establishes that “in no case will a judge admit the co-defendants as witnesses.” This provision may be extreme, but it states a commendable concern. In the case examined, the apparently coerced statement of a hypothetical participant in a crime, who was also the singular witness and only means of “certainty,” unsupported by other evidentiary instruments, determined the prosecution and protracted incarceration of the accused, contrary to logic and even to the legal standard in force at the time of the facts brought before the Inter-American Court. Said prosecution and incarceration were groundless, as would be established years later. XIV. Reasonable term 53. The issue of reasonable term also comes up in this case, as it has in many others. It is, certainly, one of the issues that have been examined most often by international human rights jurisprudence. It addresses the difficult problem of the duration of preventive detention, in addition to that of the duration of the proceeding as a whole. Justice delayed, according to the well-known adage, is justice denied. It is bad when the person awaiting that justice, which moves hesitantly and arrives very late, is deprived of his liberty; worse yet when the deprivation of liberty is an arbitrary one. 54. The Inter-American Court, in consonance with the doctrine of the European Court, has insisted on the aspects that must be taken into account to establish, in a specific case, whether there was an unacceptable delay, in other words, whether there has been disregard for the rule of the reasonable term: complexity of the matter, procedural initiative of the interested party, and conduct of the court (or whoever conducted the proceeding, as this point may be examined going beyond criminal prosecution: insofar as there is a proceeding to decide on rights that have been denied, claimed or in doubt). 55. The instant case has addressed the dies a quo and the dies ad quem of the judgment for purposes of reasonable term. It is often said that the proceeding begins when the charges are filed and it concludes when there is a definitive judgment, and that the time between both moments, with their characteristic acts, is subject to measurement under the concept of reasonable term. In principle, this specification may provide guidance and even be sufficient. However, to arrive at conclusions that respond to the concern that is at the basis of reasonable term, we must examine the characteristics of each national prosecution. The panorama is not homogeneous. Therefore, it suggests different solutions, all of them seeking to address the need for the time that an individual is subject to a criminal proceeding – which is a time of reduction, compression, suspension of rights, despite arguments, based on technicalities, that it is otherwise- to truly be the least possible time, precisely to avoid prevalence of uncertainty and to avoid affecting, beyond what is strictly indispensable, the individual’s rights. 56. Saying that reasonable term begins when an individual is detained does not lead to a satisfactory solution in all cases. Actually, it may be that before that moment there has been an ongoing, protracted investigative, and even judicial,