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No more deadlines

There is no doubt that people whose innocence can be proved by DNA testing are in prison. It's time for the Legislature to do its part to help them.

A Florida Bar committee spoke what would seem to be universal truth when it advised the Supreme Court last week that there should never be an innocent person in prison. But not everyone cares; when the Legislature adjourned four months ago, it said in effect to potentially hundreds of innocent inmates, "Stay there and rot."

That would have been the result of the Legislature's failure to extend the Oct. 1 deadline on petitions for DNA testing in old cases. To their credit, Gov. Jeb Bush, the Bar and the Florida Supreme Court have made up for the Legislature's callous indifference. By executive order, the governor saw to the preservation of DNA evidence and on the Bar's petition the court last week extended the deadline (the second such occasion on which it has had to do so) to July 1, with an eye to lifting it permanently. Prosecutors sit on the Bar committee that recommended this without dissent.

There is no longer room for even slight doubt that there are innocent people in prison or that DNA science has the power to set many of them free. Since 1989, the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and its state affiliates have secured the exoneration of 162 prisoners nationwide. Four were Floridians, one of whom had died of cancer before DNA established his innocence. It defies understanding that so many Florida legislators willfully blind themselves to the implications.

Fortunately, not all do. Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, a former prosecutor who is in the line of succession for the Senate presidency, has filed legislation (SB 86) to do away with deadlines. Importantly, his bill would also repeal the eligibility exclusion of prisoners who had pleaded guilty or no contest for fear of worse punishment, including the death penalty, if they insisted on their innocence. At least six people exonerated by DNA had pleaded guilty.

The Legislature should not only enact SB 86 but also provide money to the labor-intensive work of screening for meritorious cases, which has subsisted entirely on volunteers and private donors. According to the Florida Innocence Project, a two-person operation, there are around 1,000 Florida prisoners who have written for help, and there are surely others who don't know that they could. Experience indicates that about 100 of these will have strong claims. As many more compelling cases will have to be turned down because DNA evidence was not preserved.

Where DNA has exonerated the innocent and implicated the guilty, it has also shown how easily and often people can be wrongfully convicted by mistaken eyewitnesses, false confessions, junk science, jailhouse snitches, and overzealousness on the part of some police and prosecutors. DNA evidence is of help only where it exists, which is most often in cases of homicide and sexual assault. The criminal justice system in Florida, as in most states, is long overdue for a searching self-examination.

[Last modified October 10, 2005, 01:18:12]