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    OC district attorney ordered to turn over documents to ACLU in racial bias case
    • March 21, 2025

    A judge has ordered Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer to turn over certain office policies and training manuals to civil rights groups that sued as part of an effort to determine if there is racial bias in his prosecutions.

    Superior Court Judge Walter Schwarm made the ruling Thursday, March 20, in a 2022 public records lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundations of Northern and Southern California as well as the activist group Chicanxs de Unidxs de Orange County.

    “The judge’s order exposes what Spitzer had long denied: that his office operated with a policy of violating transparency laws, which concealed evidence of racial disparities in prosecutions,” said Emi MacLean, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and attorney for the plaintiffs.

    The district attorney’s office responded that much of the data the ACLU has been seeking already is posted on the office’s website.

    The groups sought the court order to scrutinize Spitzer’s enforcement of the state Racial Justice Act, which prohibits arrests and prosecutions based on race. Spitzer was said by a judge in June to have violated the act by making racist comments in a double-murder case against a Black defendant.

    The lawsuit also pointed to an ACLU report in February 2022 that revealed 5.8% of the criminal defendants charged in Orange County are Black, although the group makes up only 2.1% of the population. The district attorney’s office also is more likely to charge Black and Latino defendants with felonies and sentencing enhancements than White people, and less likely to offer Black and Latino people diversion as an alternative to jail, the report said.

    The study was largely based on the years before Spitzer took office in January 2019.

    ​ Orange County Register 

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