The state Supreme Court wants to review the constitutionality of a deadline for doing testing in old criminal cases.
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published October 1, 2003
TAMPA - Like defense lawyers across the state, George Tragos was scrambling Tuesday to beat today's deadline to request DNA testing in an old case.
Then word arrived that the Florida Supreme Court had suspended the deadline so the court could hear oral arguments Nov. 7 on the deadline's constitutionality.
Tragos, a Clearwater attorney, was relieved. He represents Dwight Anderson, who is serving a 27-year sentence on a 1992 conviction for second-degree murder. Tragos believes untested evidence from the crime scene, a Tampa crack house, might exonerate his client.
Tragos said he would have met the deadline "but it probably wouldn't have been as good a job."
Hundreds of other inmates seeking DNA testing might not have been so lucky had the deadline stood.
Jennifer Greenberg, who runs the Tallahassee office of the Innocence Project, said there are 600-700 requests for help from inmates across the state that her office has not yet had time even to review.
Greenberg said the Florida Supreme Court's suspension of the deadline was "a step in the right direction. That's very gratifying to see, but it's not an ultimate resolution."
In 2001, after DNA evidence exonerated two men convicted of murder, the Florida Legislature opened a two-year window for inmates to request genetic testing. The window was to close today.
The Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association supported the deadline, saying it brought a measure of finality for crime victims and their families. But legal advocates for inmates argued the deadline was unfair, pointing to how difficult it is for inmates to find lawyers, and how labor-intensive the cases can be.
The Dwight Anderson case illustrates some of the difficulty. In 1992, Anderson was convicted of shooting a crack dealer, Michael Brooks, three times with a .25-caliber handgun in a Tampa apartment. A witness hiding in a closet put Anderson at the scene.
Tragos, the defense attorney, said there were signs that Brooks fought his attacker and that the apartment was covered with blood that authorities never tested. If tested, the blood could prove someone else was present during the shooting, he said.
The Anderson case, he said, "is typical of a case that was tried, no DNA work was done, the evidence was buried somewhere in the confines of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, and it's difficult for us to recreate. That's probably the story for every one of these" DNA cases.
Tragos said he asked the Sheriff's Office to turn over its evidence, but "nobody's willing to tell us what they've got. ... It's a terrible time actually finding the evidence." Tragos will ask a Hillsborough judge to compel the Sheriff's Office to turn over what it has.
Tragos is vice-chair of the Florida Bar's Criminal Procedure Rules Committee, which is comprised of defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges and law professors. On Sept. 5, the committee voted 23-10 to file an emergency request with the Florida Supreme Court asking that the DNA deadline be extended.
On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court voted 4-3 to put aside the deadline so justices have more time to consider the constitutional issues.
