Today Arcabascio, now a law professor, has a dramatically different perspective. She teaches post-conviction procedure and supervises students working to uncover wrongful convictions as part of the Innocence Project, an effort founded by defense lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.
Around the country a small army of private lawyers, legal assistance groups and law schools have been recruited to set up branches of the Innocence Project to push claims of wrongful conviction to resolution by science, where possible.
Arcabascio and the Shepard Broad Law Center at Nova Southeastern University began Florida's first branch of the Innocence Project in 1999. In March, Florida State University's law school became the second.
As a prosecutor, Arcabascio says, "you really get tunnel vision. A prosecutor is trying to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but there is room for error." As for police, she says, "it's very easy to establish probable cause."
In the past 10 years, science has destroyed the notion of an infallible justice system as DNA testing has become a powerful tool for undoing convictions tainted by faulty and dishonest testimony, coerced confessions, sloppy police work, inadequate legal representation and sometimes just terrible mistakes.
But DNA-based exonerations do not occur entirely on the strength of science. The legal system does not give up its convictions without a fight. Prosecutors, judges and legislators weigh the risks of wrongful conviction against the concept of "finality," which holds that cases ought to be put to rest at some point, that litigation cannot continue indefinitely.
It can take some dramatically persuasive lawyering to get around such reluctance.
Deadline pressure
Arcabascio's work has taken on particular urgency in recent months. A 2001 state law created a right to DNA testing for convicted prisoners who can establish that such testing is likely to exonerate them, but the law came with a two-year window. On Oct. 1, the right expires for all Florida prisoners whose convictions occurred before the law was passed.
In a state that has the third-highest number of prisoners, there are potentially hundreds of inmates who could be shut out by the deadline.
The Innocence Project's New York office was handling 450 Florida cases this spring when it decided Florida needed help. Florida State University law professor Meg Baldwin and a colleague were recruited to open the state's second front.
Huy Dao, a lawyer with the Innocence Project in New York, was dispatched to spend April training the FSU group.
Florida, Dao says, is a priority for the Innocence Project for several reasons. First, is the deadline. Though Florida is not the only state to impose a deadline on requests for DNA testing, Dao says the other states, such as Delaware, had such small inmate populations that it was not considered a crisis. Second, although Florida leads the nation in the number of death row exonerations, at 25, Dao says there have been only two exonerations in the state as the result of DNA testing, an anomaly that the Innocence Project's lawyers can't explain.
"Certainly the number of exonerations as opposed to the prison population was startling," he says. "To have only two DNA exonerations is weird."
Some defense lawyers say that up until the new law was passed, Florida courts placed tremendous hurdles on convicted prisoners seeking DNA testing. What-ever the reason, the statistic alone suggests to Innocence Project lawyers that Florida's inmate population could be fertile ground for the discovery of wrongful convictions, given broad access to DNA testing.
"A tragedy"
The state's Innocence Project volunteers face a monumental task. "Experience tells us (it takes) a minimum of five years" to do the proper investigation required to present a motion seeking DNA exoneration, Arcabascio says.
Most of the cases are at least 20 to 30 years old; some date back to the 1960s. Though the law does not require lawyers to locate 30-year-old biological samples, Arcabascio says it doesn't make sense
to pursue cases where the evidence is no longer available. And so her nine students and three research assistants work the phones and the courthouses, tracking down ancient transcripts to determine if there's evidence stored away somewhere that might be tested for DNA.
So far Nova has three cases in testing and expects to file another six to eight by August. More than five dozen other cases are under investigation, and Arcabascio works under the realization that valid claims of innocence might not be prepared in time. "I can only describe this as a tragedy," she says. "I would hate to have an innocent person precluded because of an arbitrary statute of limitations. The biggest argument that proponents (of the deadline) have is this issue of finality, but the truth is finality cannot trump justice."
Baldwin and her students have about 26 active cases. "We are going to do everything in our power to move these cases as fast as possible," she says.