A state appeals court moved Thursday to drop the remaining criminal charges against a key advisor to former Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gasc, a scathing critique of one of California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s most politically charged trials.
Last year, Diana Teran was charged with eleven counts of unlawfully accessing private police discipline records while working as a constitutional policing advisor for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and then exploiting the information while employed for Gascn.
As part of the D.A.’s office’s attempt to seek down officers with disciplinary histories, Teran and her legal team have long maintained that the data were public court records and that she was merely forwarding them to a colleague.
The appeals court rejected the attorney general’s claims that Teran’s conduct were illegal despite the fact that the information she obtained was openly accessible in a unanimous 26-page decision released Thursday morning.
According to the court, there is nothing in these court records that the general public could not discover by seeing court proceedings in person or by looking through publicly accessible information from the court’s docket and files.
Experts in computer crime have pointed out that the statute Bonta cited was more concerned with hacking and unauthorized access to computer systems than it was with the conduct Teran was alleged to have engaged in. That stance was upheld by the appeals court on Thursday.
James Spertus, Teran’s principal defense lawyer, expressed his gratitude for the court’s ruling.
According to him, it’s helpful to have the clarity the court provided because these are significant concerns that impact thousands of Californians.
Whether the Attorney General’s Office will file an appeal has not been made clear. According to a spokesman, we are examining the viewpoint.
The Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman chose not to comment.
The ruling follows months of hearings in which Bonta’s case appeared to be losing ground, and six months after the appeals court took the unprecedented step of requesting that state prosecutors personally attend and defend the prosecution before determining whether to allow it to proceed.
Before a preliminary hearing last year, the prosecution dropped three of the counts against Teran, and Judge Sam Ohta of the L.A. County Superior Court dismissed two more. The ordinarily stoic Ohta frequently rolled his eyes and moaned at the prosecution’s attempts to defend the case during the hearing.
Teran did not download the data from the Sheriff’s Department personnel file system, according to testimony given at the hearing. She usually found out about the alleged wrongdoing when coworkers sent her copies of court documents from lawsuits that sheriff’s deputies had filed in an attempt to reverse the discipline against them.
The case’s core claims stem from Teran’s time serving as a constitutional policing consultant to then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell, the current chief of police in Los Angeles, in 2018. Internal affairs investigations and access to private deputy documents were among her regular responsibilities.
Teran joined the District Attorney’s Office after leaving the Sheriff’s Department. She forwarded court documents pertaining to about three dozen deputies to a subordinate in April 2021 for review in order to see whether they should be added to the internal databases prosecutors use to identify officers with a history of misconduct and dishonesty.
One is called the Brady database, a reference to the Brady v. Maryland ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963, which states that prosecutors must provide material that could support a defendant, including proof of police misconduct.
The allegations against Teran were quickly seized upon by Gasc’s most ardent opponents, notably former Sheriff Alex Villanueva and current District Attorney Nathan Hochman, who used them as part of a successful effort to remove the progressive from office.
Hochman questioned if Gascn blessed Teran’s alleged criminal behavior was legitimate throughout the campaign.
Did he bring her on specifically to profit from the illicit downloads she had previously made while working at the Sheriff’s Department? He inquired, even though the case’s evidence never supported that claim.
A request for comment from Hochman’s representative was not immediately answered.
Teran was discovered unlawfully accessing private personnel data, including those of my entire transition team, for political reasons that had nothing to do with her work at the time, Villanueva stated in an email. That fundamental fact is unchanged by this result.
Some echoed criminal justice reform advocates’ long-standing accusation that Teran was being targeted by law enforcement for promoting Gasc’s larger police accountability program, which helped propel him into office in 2020, following Thursday’s decision.
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and the founder of the criminal justice reform advocacy group Fair and Just Prosecution, said that the use of limited prosecutorial resources to pursue criminal charges against a longtime public servant dedicated to police accountability was disheartening, baseless, and inexplicable from the beginning.
Keri Blakinger used to work as a staff writer for the Times.
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