Anaheim, CA – In a recent meeting in which prosecutors were deciding whether to seek the death penalty against a black defendant, District Attorney Todd Spitzer insisted that he, ”… knows many black people who get themselves out of their bad circumstances and bad situations by dating white women.” District Attorney Spitzer then fired the attorney who reported the statement in a memo.
“Our justice system is supposed to judge people based on facts and evidence, not the color of their skin. The chief law enforcement officer for the 6th most populous county in the United States made his racist beliefs clear to a group of senior prosecutors while deliberating the death penalty for a black man.” said Democratic Party of Orange County Chairwoman Ada Briceño. “This is one of many examples why Spitzer is unfit to serve in our halls of justice. Racism must stop. Retaliation must stop. Spitzer must resign.”
“This is a pattern with District Attorney Spitzer. He has shown time again that he does not care how people are treated by the justice system, especially those within the BIPOC community,” said elected Rancho Santiago Community College District Vice President David Crockett. “The current DA does not measure up.”
About the Democratic Party of Orange County
Once famously known as “Reagan country,” after President Reagan called Orange County the place where “all good Republicans go to die,” Orange County is rapidly shifting from a Republican stronghold into a highly diverse Democratic metropolis. Over the past four years, Orange County Democrats built a 5-point gain in voter registration and now outpace the OC GOP by more than four points.
Chairwoman Ada Briceño, a longtime labor organizer, Co-President of UNITE HERE Local 11, and Democratic National Committee member, is the first immigrant and second Latina to lead the Democratic Party of Orange County. At age 23, Executive Director Ajay Mohan became the youngest person and first Indian-American to hold that role.
Orange County Democrats keep scoring historic victories in recent elections. In 2018, they famously swept all seven Congressional seats in Orange County. In 2019, OC Democrats overtook countywide voter registration to become the region’s leading political party. In 2020, OC Democrats flipped 20 local seats and two state senate seats from red to blue, including in deep-red areas of the county. In 2021, OC Democrats powered Katrina Foley to become the first Democrat to represent the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ 2nd District in 127 years and stopped the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom by over 3 points.
Orange County is the nation’s sixth largest county, with 3.2 million residents and more than 670,000 registered Democratic voters.