The California Court of Appeals is scrutinizing the criminal prosecution of a former top district attorney’s office and questioning the state’s Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office will need to further justify the case in court before deciding whether to proceed with the case.
Earlier this year, then-DA adviser Diana Teran was indicted on 11 felonies after state prosecutors said she violated California’s hacking laws. Teran is accused of sending court records to colleagues in 2021 as part of an effort to track down officers with disciplinary records. The state claims Teran knew about the records because he had access to confidential disciplinary files while working for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department three years ago.
The trial, which state prosecutors estimated would take three weeks, was scheduled to begin in January. But on Monday, the appeals court delayed the process for at least three months, leaving open the possibility of dismissing the case altogether.
The court issued a two-page order to show cause and set a hearing for April in which prosecutors will argue why the high court should allow the case to proceed without upholding the defense team’s request to throw it out.
“We are grateful that the Court of Appeal has agreed to evaluate this matter before trial,” James Spertas, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Teran, told the Times on Monday. “I said this at the beginning of the lawsuit: All she shared was public court records. Public records belong to the public, not LASD.”
Bonta’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and founder of Fair and Just Prosecution, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform, said the appeals court’s decision was unusual.
“It’s not something the Court of Appeal would normally intervene at this stage of a case,” she told the Times on Monday. “This puts the AG’s office on the defensive.”
The allegations at the center of the case date back to 2018, when Teran was working as a constitutional police adviser to then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell. Her regular duties included access to confidential sub-records and internal affairs investigations.
After Teran left the Sheriff’s Office, he joined the District Attorney’s Office. During her stay in April 2021, she asked about 30 members of Congress to evaluate their potential for inclusion in an internal database used by prosecutors to track police officers with a history of fraud and other misconduct. I sent the court records regarding this to my subordinates.
One is known as the Brady database. This is a reference to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision, which requires prosecutors to introduce evidence favorable to the defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.
The agency claimed that some of the names Teran sent to his subordinates were those of deputies whose files Teran had accessed while working for the Sheriff’s Office several years ago.
However, testimony at a preliminary hearing in August revealed that she did not download the information from the sheriff’s department’s personnel file system. In most cases, she learned of the alleged misconduct when colleagues emailed her copies of court records from lawsuits they filed hoping to overturn the department’s discipline.
State investigators said they found that 11 of the men’s names were not listed in public records or mainstream media. Prosecutors said they believe this means Teran could not have identified deputies or looked into court records without special access while working for the Sheriff’s Department.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped three of the charges without explanation, but Ota said there was no evidence Teran had pursued or reviewed any disciplinary incidents involving those deputies while he was with the sheriff’s office. has withdrawn two cases.
Ota said Teran could have searched the lawmaker’s name on the department’s confidential personnel data system for the six pending charges after he received the records in question via email. These searches could uncover connections between public records and classified information, he said.
In October, Mr. Teran’s lawyers argued in an appeals court filing that there was no sufficient probable cause to continue the prosecution. The 54-page filing said Ota agreed that the records Teran sent to colleagues were public documents and argued that he did not need permission from the sheriff’s office to use them.
The AG’s office filed a response, calling this record “LASD data” and stating that “Logically, LASD is the only organization that can grant permission to anyone to use LASD data.”
A person in Teran’s position “would have known that she could not use LASD data at another agency without LASD’s permission,” the state’s attorney wrote.
On Monday, just a week before the trial was scheduled to begin, the appeals court issued an order setting the hearing for April 2 in Los Angeles.
