Supervisors OK Funds for Anti-Crime DNA Tests

The Orange County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to make the county Sheriff’s Department the first law enforcement agency in California and only the third in the nation to have a genetic testing laboratory.

Supervisors voted 4 to 0 to spend $200,000 for equipment and technicians and construction of the facilities in the county morgue building in Santa Ana.

The laboratory will make possible DNA--or deoxyribonucleic acid--profiles of unique genetic codes in everything from hair and skin samples to blood and other body fluids, helping prosecutors tie evidence to a crime suspect.

The lab will be in operation by late December and two chemists should be ready to take their first case by January, 1990, coroner’s office spokesman Larry Ragle said. The lab will include $80,000 in special equipment, the most expensive being a video-imaging system, an environmental incubator, a genetic evaluation system, scales and a chromatography refrigerator.

“I believe that this DNA lab will make a wonderful present for the people of Orange County to have under their Christmas trees for 1989,” Supervisor Don R. Roth said. “And let the word go out into the criminal world that Orange County will have the most modern crime-fighting tools in our arsenal--a DNA lab,” he added.

The county also will include a genetic testing laboratory as part of the county’s planned new forensics building that will be built in two years. Because the Sheriff’s Department has been training the two employees in genetic research, Orange County is perhaps more than a year ahead of Los Angeles or the state in operating a genetic testing laboratory, Ragle said. The state plans to build its main DNA lab at Berkeley.

Some staff members said they could not remember when an issue was dealt with so quickly by Orange County supervisors. Questions on financing the lab surfaced a little more than two weeks ago, and since then, county administrators prepared a lengthy report on the feasibility of such a laboratory. That report was approved Tuesday by the supervisors.

The latest push for the DNA lab followed the recent rape of a 12-year-old girl in a gated community in Huntington Beach. It was learned that the suspect arrested in that case earlier had been acquitted of a rape charge after prosecutors were late in receiving DNA evidence from an outside lab.

Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, who stirred some hard feelings when she said at the earlier board meeting that she identified more with rape victims than the four male supervisors, was absent for the vote Tuesday because she was in Washington on county business. But in a prepared statement, Wieder said the lab approval “will go a long way toward ensuring that residents of Orange County receive the best law enforcement services available.”

Roth, who called for the study on how to fund the DNA lab without using general fund money, praised the district attorney’s office, the county counsel’s office and the Sheriff’s Department for completing the report in “record time.” The report said the lab could be self-sufficient in the future, especially if it is designated a regional facility by the state.

None of the start-up funds will come from the county’s general fund. About $120,000 of the needed amount will come from Neighborhood Development and Preservation funds, raised from county property taxes and designated for redevelopment projects, along with $80,000 raised by the Sheriff’s Advisory Council from private sources in the county. The county counsel has determined that use of redevelopment funds for the lab is legal.

There remains some uncertainty, however, about the admissibility of such evidence.

According to Orange County’s lawyers, the highest appeals court in Virginia has ruled that DNA evidence is admissible, and DNA evidence has been admitted in trial courts in 32 states, including a case in Ventura County.

Earlier this year, Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp approved use of so-called “genetic fingerprinting” evidence in criminal cases. But there have not yet been any California appellate cases or any California statute on the admissibility of DNA testing evidence in California Courts, said Barbara L. Stocker, deputy county counsel.