Twenty-four years in prison apparently didn’t harden Alan Crotzer. But then again, he wasn’t the hardcore type to begin with.

Unfortunately, it took awhile for him to convince the justice system of that.

Last month, Crotzer was freed from a Florida prison after DNA evidence proved that he couldn’t have been the ringleader of a gang who robbed a Tampa family in 1981, and raped the mother and her 12-year-old daughter. But like many black criminal defendants who face all-white juries on charges of violating white women, all it took was the word of the victim -- who picked Crotzer out of a photo lineup -- and an hour of deliberation for them to convict him. Then the judge did his part in erasing any recurring nightmares that the victims might have about Crotzer hunting them down and hurting them again.

He gave the brother 130 years.

Twice Crotzer asked that his DNA samples be tested against that of the victims. Twice he was turned down. Were it not for the doggedness of the sisters of the men who actually committed the crimes -- they said Crotzer didn’t even know their brothers, much less help them -- and the New York-based Innocence Project, whose lawyers worked pro bono to get his conviction overturned, he’d be wasting away more of his years behind the not-so-cozy confines of steel and stone.
 
Yet Crotzer, who is now 45, told The Miami Herald that he wasn’t bitter. He said he was happy and blessed to find people who believed in his innocence, and who worked to free him.

He’s a very nice man.

But Crotzer ought not to be so nice if his story, as well as the stories of five other men who have been exonerated in Florida after DNA tests proved they were wrongly imprisoned, has as little sway over the state’s lawmakers as his pleas of innocence had over the jury that locked him up.
 
Right now, prisoners who were convicted before 2001 have until July to use DNA tests to prove they didn’t commit the crimes. Prisoners convicted since 2001 have two years to use DNA to prove they didn’t do it. Seeing that Crotzer was exonerated five years after he discovered the Innocent Project and it took up his case, it is obviously unrealistic for anyone to believe that when it comes to seeking justice, deadlines ought to apply.

But sadly enough, what most fair-minded people see as a no-brainer is being seen as a matter to be studied by some Republican lawmakers. Florida’s House Criminal Justice Committee said that’s what it needs to do before lifting the deadlines for DNA testing.

Five men were wrongly convicted. Five men spent decades in prison for stuff they didn’t do.

What the hell is there to study?

Chances are what these lawmakers are hemming and hawing about has little to do with ensuring justice for the Crotzers of the world and more to do with ensuring that a state that is intent on making criminals pay for their wrongdoings doesn’t have to pay when the criminal justice system -- a system that many of them have relied on to back up their tough-on-crime political strategies -- gets it wrong.

And it seems as if the system isn’t immune to getting it wrong.

Recently, the state had to pay Wilton Dedge $2 million after he spent 22 years in prison for a rape that he didn’t commit. Certainly lawmakers can’t have poor white trash like Dedge, and blacks like Crotzer, getting rich at taxpayers’ expense -- despite the fact that money can’t make up for the years they lost while locked away. On top of that, DNA testing is costly. But most of all, DNA testing has exposed the kind of flaws in the criminal justice system that the tough-on-crime crowd has always tried to ignore: the fact that racial bias often rules when it comes to making the kind of identifications that got Crotzer convicted. For example, of the first 172 cases of defendants nationally who were exonerated through the Innocence Project after being convicted through mistaken identifications, 57 percent were black.

That says that when it comes to seeing criminals, some people only see black.

There also is the chance that the lawmakers who have relied on locking people up as a scare tactic to win votes might find themselves at a disadvantage if more DNA exonerations cause people to begin to fear the ineptness of the criminal justice system more than the criminals it is supposed to be protecting everyone from.

But there’s some good news. Study or no, Gov. Jeb Bush and the state’s top lawmakers seem poised to lift the DNA deadlines. As they should.

Still, I worry.

I worry because these are times in which lawmakers -- especially GOP lawmakers -- have found fear to be a valuable tool. They are, after all, part of the party who used Willie Horton, the furloughed Massachusetts murderer and rapist who doomed Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign in 1988, as the great evil in America. In Florida, they are the folks who have helped to gorge the prisons by turning many third-degree misdemeanors into felonies. I worry because in these times, times in which ideology trumps science and common sense, it might be just as easy for some to ignore the accuracy of DNA evidence and the worth of people’s lives to preserve a political strategy.

That can’t be allowed to happen. Because justice shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of economic expediency. Or politics.