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The Florida Supreme Court did the right thing by suspending the arbitrary two-year deadline on the petition process for postconviction DNA testing.
Had the Florida Supreme Court not acted, the door would have closed on Florida inmates seeking to demonstrate their innocence through DNA testing. A law passed in 2001 had given inmates only two years to petition the court for a postconviction DNA test that might exonerate them. But the petition process is more complicated than it sounds, and as the Wednesday deadline approached it was clear that hundreds of inmates who had hoped to assert their claims of innocence had not yet gotten into court.
In a move consistent with the ideals of justice, the state's high court has now suspended the deadline. Next month it will hear oral arguments over whether to adopt new rules that would give inmates another year to access DNA testing. The ruling also prevents state law enforcement agencies from unilaterally destroying any biological evidence in their possession.
The power of DNA testing to determine with assurance the guilt of one person and the innocence of another makes it a unique tool warranting special rules. DNA evidence is not like eye-witness testimony whose accuracy may fade in time. Just the opposite, with the passage of time, DNA testing has become significantly more sophisticated, so that now even the genetic material found on a human hair can be analyzed and matched to the precise head it came from. Arbitrary deadlines for this type of testing in any given case may serve the minor interest of "finality," but that is nothing compared to correcting an injustice. The integrity of the criminal justice system can only be enhanced when an innocent inmate is exonerated and the real perpetrator is identified - regardless of how long after conviction that takes.
According to the Florida Innocence Project and the Florida Innocence Initiative, there are nearly 600 inmates who have requested help to file a petition for DNA testing but have not met the statutory deadline. The difficulty is often in tracking down what biological evidence there is and where it is being stored - a process that is nearly impossible to do from a prison cell.
The Florida Supreme Court should recognize that the due process interests in granting expanded access to DNA testing outweigh any inconvenience to the system. It should give the potentially innocent men and women sitting in Florida's prisons another year - at least - to make their claims.