Orange County prosecutors have to throw out large chunks of their DNA database as part of a new legal settlement, months after they quietly suspended DNA collection for at least a year.
The DNA collection program, colloquially known as Spit and Acquit, was started by former District Attorney Tony Rackauckus in 2007 and offered misdemeanor defendants a choice – face charges, or pay a small fee and submit your DNA to a countywide database.
The database contained nearly 215,000 people’s DNA as of January 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.
For the last five years, county lawyers have been wrapped up in a lawsuit from UCI criminology professor emeritus William Thompson, who alleged the database opened the door to potential unconstitutional arrests.
Now, that lawsuit has been settled, and introduced several new controls over how long DNA can remain in the system and what the public gets to know about it.
Spit and Acquit Overhauled
Now, anyone whose DNA was collected or is collected in the future will automatically have their DNA expunged after 15 years for a slate of misdemeanors, including things like altering a license plate, drinking alcohol in public and disobeying direction at a stoplight.
To view the settlement and full list of offenses, click here.
Other people who commit crimes that make them ineligible for automatic deletion can petition to have their DNA profile removed after 25 years provided they have not reoffended in some other way.
District Attorney Todd Spitzer will also be responsible for new transparency measures, including an automatic disclosure of what charges required someone to submit their DNA, if it was ever matched to a case, and the number of DNA profiles expunged each year.
Thompson, the former professor who sued the county over this issue, said that while he wished the regulations were even stronger, he was grateful for the improvements being implemented.
“There was no limitation at all on how long the DA could keep people’s DNA, it didn’t even terminate at death. They could keep your DNA forever,” Thompson said. “We wanted to place some limitations on how long they could keep it.”
Thompson also noted that it’s important for county prosecutors to weigh the benefits with the downsides of how that DNA could be misused or mishandled, especially when it comes to using the data for familial searches.
“I’m somebody who’s written a lot about what can go wrong with DNA evidence and having your DNA in this database puts you at certain risk,” Thompson said. “Their relatives could be falsely linked to crimes. From my point of view, this is a risk to the community and to people in the database and we have to ask if this risk is being balanced by the crime solving ability of this database.”
Thompson did not receive any money as part of the settlement agreement, but his lawyers will be paid out by the county.
Spitzer, who criticized the program before he was elected in 2018 before turning into one of its most vocal defenders, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
County prosecutors also quietly announced to staff in June they would be suspending any new DNA collection for at least a year amid the county’s budget cuts, but did not rule out bringing the program back in the future.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
