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  Here's an article copied and pasted from miami.com and the Miami Herald about DNA.

Posted on Sat, Apr. 15, 2006
In My Opinion
Changes to bill on DNA testing a real injustice
By Ana Menendez
MiamiHerald.com

Simplicity, in art, may be the height of sophistication, but in politics, power too often accrues to those with the talent to turn the straightforward into masterpieces of complexity.

Justice is an abstract concept, but it's also a starkly simple one: Guilty people belong in jail; innocent people do not.

Leave it to a few in the state House to muck it all up. A handful of legislators are trying to weaken a bill that would make it easier for the wrongly imprisoned to be set free.

In the beginning, House Bill 61 was a refreshingly simple thing. The house companion to a Senate bill, it was supposed to allow Florida inmates the right to prove their innocence with a DNA test.

It has become a struck-out, under-lined, hyper-edited mess that should embarrass anyone who cares about the truth.

The last-minute changes to the bill have stunned both Republicans and Democrats who are working to lift a deadline on DNA testing statewide and frustrated those who work with the wrongly accused.

''It boggles the mind why some people want to make such an easy concept extremely difficult,'' said state Sen. Alex Villalobos, the Miami Republican who has championed a similar bill in the Senate.

VOTE SLATED FOR TUESDAY

Most of the changes in the bill, scheduled for a vote Tuesday, are needless. But among the most troubling is one that would affect those prisoners serving long sentences because they've been accused of other crimes.

Under the proposed changes, those prisoners would not be allowed to get a DNA test to prove they are innocent of those other crimes and have therefore been wrongly sentenced to long prison terms. The changes could conceivably send the getaway driver to the electric chair while the triggerman gets life.

Rep. Don Brown, the Defuniak Springs Republican, said he made the changes to prevent prisoners from ''abusing'' the court system.

Where's the abuse? If anything, Brown's changes allow the system to abuse the prisoner by keeping him in jail longer for crimes he didn't commit. The new language also, incidentally, abuses the taxpayer, who is paying to keep a prisoner in jail who shouldn't be there.

All this rhetoric about ''court system abuse'' is getting old anyway. Whatever costs are associated with clearing people's records are negligible compared to the costs of keeping an innocent person in jail -- from the financial burden on tax payers, to the moral burden of thwarting justice while real criminals go unpunished.

As Jenny Greenberg, director of the Florida Innocence Initiative, said: ``I'm fixing the mistakes. I'm not making the mistakes.''

`A SEARCH FOR TRUTH'

The Florida Innocence Initiative, which has used DNA evidence to help clear wrongly accused prisoners in the state, receives no taxpayer money for its bare-bones operation and is too terrified to ask for any, afraid that doing so would doom the DNA bills. How sad is that?

Greenberg, the only attorney with the project, has often gone without a salary to pay the bills. The Florida Innocence Initiative's entire yearly budget has never been higher than $100,000, and that includes the costs of the DNA tests themselves. The project recently received a grant from the Florida Bar Foundation that will allow it to hire two more lawyers and a social worker.

''DNA testing is just a search for truth,'' Greenberg pleaded. ``There are no machinations going on. No one needs to be afraid of this.''

It's all very simple: Either a crime is committed or it's not. In the past, this simple idea was often difficult to prove. Increasingly, thanks to DNA technology, it's become pretty easy.

Except, of course, when it gets into the hands of someone determined to make it needlessly complicated.

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