Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer quietly sunset a controversial DNA collection program last month amid budget cuts at the county government after years of questioning in courts over whether it was constitutional or not. 

The program – colloquially known as “Spit and Acquit” – was started by Spitzer’s predecessor Tony Rackauckus in 2007.

It offered people charged with a misdemeanor a choice – face charges, or pay a fee to take a DNA swab and put it into the county’s database. 

While Spitzer questioned the program while he was a county supervisor, he reversed course shortly after his 2018 election win and has been a supporter of the program ever since, receiving at least $4.2 million in the last five years from county supervisors to help manage it. 

The database contained nearly 215,000 people’s DNA as of Jan. 2025 according to a county staff report, and at the time prosecutors also confirmed the database was used at least successfully over 12,000 times to generate “hits or leads” that were shared with police departments across the county. 

But in an email to the district attorney’s staff on the evening of May 21, Amanda Maldonado, an Executive Management Assistant at the DA’s office, sent out an email titled “Temporary Suspension of the DNA Collections Program.” 

“It is with deep regret that we share that, due to a mandatory budget reduction from the County, the program will be temporarily suspended for the upcoming year,” reads the email, which is signed “on behalf of executive management.” 

County lawyers are also in the midst of settling a lawsuit questioning whether the program is constitutional, but would not comment on if the program’s closure was part of the settlement negotiations. 

Read: Lawsuit Against District Attorney’s DNA Program Revived, Raising Constitutional Concerns

Kimberly Edds, a spokesperson for the DA’s office, declined to comment aside from confirming the closure was not in response to the settlement negotiations. 

The database alone cost the county nearly $1 million in storage over the last fiscal year, a contract that is set to wrap up at the end of June. 

Maldonado also noted in an email to staff the program was only suspended for the next year, leaving it an open question on whether the county could resume testing in the future.

Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.

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