How Much Time Can We Stand? DNA Evidence and the Principle of Finality in Criminal Law

New genetic techniques act upon our perception of time and the way we deal with time—the way we perform time, so to speak. In the context of medical science and practice, for example, DNA tests translate possible future health problems into the present, with the question of what one should do now in order to avoid those problems later on; accordingly, the future is displaced—folded—into the present. Conversely, the use of DNA tests in legal contexts involves the displacement of the past into the present: genetic identification techniques make it possible to reopen old cases and to solve cold cases, even far beyond statutory periods of limitation. After all, it seems, the truth of DNA is everlasting.

Thus, genetic techniques make it more than ever possible to draw the future and the past into the present. At first sight, there is no problem with using DNA tests to fold time; on the contrary, the recognition of past and future increases the rationality of current decisions. But how much do we want to know about the future? And how much of the past do we want to be burdened with? If future and past are endlessly made present—that is, re-present-ed here and now—the future loses its openness and uncertainty, and the past no longer comes to an end. Time, then, will lose its expunging effect, possibly resulting in an overload of the present. Are we strong enough to sustain so much compressed time? How much time can we stand, actually? And do we want it? In other words, the initially liberating effects of knowledge about the past and the future might reach a turning point—one in which the folding of time turns into the burden of time.¹

In effect, what at first sight seems to be a rather innocent issue turns out to have profound cultural and normative consequences. It relates to our being-in-time, to paraphrase Martin Heidegger.² It affects the way we live in time or, more appropriately, the way we live time. Along with new technologies such as genomics, new ways of performing time are generated and opened up. In that sense, science, technology, and society are indeed profoundly coproduced, as the common thread of Science and Technology Studies (STS) goes—even, and in particular, on this basic level of time-orders and orderings.³ In this paper I will demonstrate the time-politics of technology by focusing on a specific site of folding the past into the present: DNA-induced changes in criminal law, in particular changes in statutes of limitation, using the Dutch parliamentary debates on this subject as a particular case in point. Disregarding the political power of (DNA) technologies as coproducers of social and moral order evidently leads to an underestimation of the burden of time imposed by genomics.

The Specificity and Robustness of DNA Techniques

Genomics is not the first and only time-folding technology: printing, the steam engine, and electricity, as well as such information and communication technologies as the Internet and e-mail, have all substantially contributed to the compression of time.⁴ Or, to stick to legal and medical contexts, criminal law has always brought the past into the spotlight, whether by means of personal testimony, fingerprinting, or any other medium of representation. And predictive medicine is not exclusively dependent on DNA tests: there are a lot of other means to forecast our future health in order to influence contemporary ways of life (techniques ranging from epidemiology to conventional wisdom). Nonetheless, genomics contributes to the folding of time in two specific ways: First, it modifies time folding in quantitative terms, enabling it to occur more quickly, more frequently, and with greater intensity. Due to the rapid growth of electronically stored DNA information in both law and medicine, past and future can be made infinitely present at any moment, any place and in no time—just click the button. Second, genomics changes the folding of time qualitatively. Formerly, the translation of past and future into...