In a groundbreaking case out of Sacramento, a split California Supreme Court ruled Monday that the use of a DNA profile to identify an unknown suspect in an arrest warrant is a legitimate way to beat the deadline for filing criminal charges.

"We conclude that, when there is no more particular, accurate or reliable means of identification available to law enforcement, an arrest warrant or a complaint that describes the person to be arrested by a fictitious name and his unique DNA profile ... satisfies the 'particularity' requirements" of state and federal law, the court said in a 5-2 ruling authored by Justice Ming W. Chin.

Justice Carlos Moreno, in a dissent joined by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, called the use of a "John Doe" warrant "a clever artifice intended solely to satisfy the statute of limitations until the identity of the perpetrator could be discovered."

The ruling "will permit this type of sham arrest warrant to be used to circumvent the statute of limitations in any criminal prosecution in California in which biological evidence is left at the crime scene from which DNA can be extracted," Moreno wrote.

The 46-page majority opinion affirmed the 2003 rape conviction in Sacramento Superior Court of Paul Eugene Robinson, who was named as a defendant after the six-year statute of limitations for the crime had expired.

Deputy District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, at the urging of now-retired Sacramento Police Department Detective Pete Willover, filed a complaint Aug. 21, 2000, four days before the deadline, against an unknown individual who had left DNA at the Natomas scene of a sexual assault.

The individual was charged with the 1994 rape only by genetic makeup - a series of almost 200 letters, numbers and parentheses. The next day's arrest warrant identified him as "John Doe, male black."

Twenty-five days later, an analysis of Robinson's DNA resulted in a "cold hit" match with the DNA obtained from the semen recovered from the rape victim.

Not only had the statute of limitations passed, the 1999 blood sample from Robinson that matched the semen turned out to be an unlawful draw.

But a majority of the state high court said neither of those facts was enough to nullify Robinson's conviction.

Robinson, now 40, was the first person in the nation to be sentenced to prison after being identified only by a DNA code. He is serving a 65-year term imposed in 2003.