A top official in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office has asked a judge to dismiss 11 felony charges filed against her by state prosecutors, while her lawyer argued in a court document that confidential files she is accused of misusing are actually public records.
In April, California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused Diana Teran, then a top adviser to District Attorney George Gascón, of illegally accessing confidential records of 11 sheriff’s deputies when she flagged their names for inclusion in a database used by prosecutors to track officers accused of misconduct.
Within hours of Bonta’s public announcement, Teran’s attorney, James Spertus, Said his client did nothing wrong and that all of the records in question are presumably public in existing court documents.
But because state prosecutors asked that the deputy’s name be kept secret, Spertus was unable to prove it for two months. Then last week, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, The judge opened an important documentThat includes an unedited version of the defense filed under seal.
Public version of the document – Affidavit used to justify charges against Teran — revealed the names of two deputies, both of whose disciplinary histories could easily be found through a Google search. The unredacted version showed that records pertaining to nine other deputies were already public, according to Spertus’ latest court filing.
“From the moment this case was filed, I was suspicious about what the motive was (for filing it), because there is no crime involved and the release of the affidavit confirms that,” Spertus told the Times late Monday. “The underlying theory is that he stole public information.”
The California Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Teran was scheduled to enter a plea Monday morning. But the judge resumed the hearing after state prosecutors said they needed time to respond to Spertus’ filing.
Much of the brief hearing focused on hundreds of pages of attachments filed by Spertus, which he said were all publicly available court records. State prosecutors questioned whether Spertus was allowed to file them publicly based on his knowledge of the nine redacted names.
Prosecutors did not comment on the substance of Spertus’ filings, but accused him in court of circumventing the protective order. The judge decided to keep those attachments sealed for now.
The allegations at the center of the case date back to at least 2018, when Teran worked as a constitutional policing consultant at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Her normal duties there included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. According to the affidavit unsealed last week, the department’s secret tracking software logged all of her searches and kept a record of the more than 1,600 personnel files she searched and reviewed.
Teran worked as an assistant district attorney on ethics and integrity operations. A spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office previously said in a statement that Teran was no longer in that role, and no further explanation was provided.
The affidavit says that after joining the office in 2021, Teran sent a list of 33 names and supporting documents to another prosecutor for possible inclusion in the so-called Brady database, which includes officers with problematic disciplinary histories. The name is a reference to a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.
Many of the names Teran emailed to fellow prosecutor Pamela Revell were deputy sheriffs whose files she had access to while working at the sheriff’s department, and that she would otherwise “not have been able to identify many of these deputy sheriffs,” the affidavit said.
The 11 felony charges were against 11 of the 33 deputies whose names the affidavit said “neither appeared in public records request responses nor in media articles.”
But, as stated earlier Los Angeles Public PressTwo names left unredacted in the public version of the affidavit last week belonged to deputies whose disciplinary records were already openly available through other means. After they appealed their dismissals for dishonesty in the early 2010s, their disciplinary histories were discussed in detail in publicly available court decisions a few years later.
After the remaining nine names were finally revealed Thursday, Spertus argued in his paperwork filed this week that all representatives’ records were equally accessible.
“The Attorney General’s entire conviction theory relies on the allegation that Ms. Teran attached non-public documents to her email on April 26, 2021, yet Plaintiffs never saw those documents in the Los Angeles Superior Court files that they allege are now non-public,” Spertus wrote. “Each of the 11 documents that underlie the 11 counts in the complaint is a document that is public and located in the Los Angeles Superior Court case files.”
He argued that the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t “own” public court records because they are kept in the Sheriff’s Department’s files.
“Ms. Teran will not need permission from LASD to use any public records that are in the LASD database, and she may use those public records for any purpose,” Spertus wrote. “Simply put, the ‘use’ of public information cannot be a crime.”
In his 40-page document, Spertus also raised concerns over whether the case — which is based on material obtained in 2018 — had already passed the three-year statute of limitations for charges.
Teran is expected back in court on July 17, though his attorney has expressed frustration with the delay.
He said, “Ever since this case was filed it has been a struggle to figure out what this case is about, and as soon as I am able to get a hearing on it I hope it will be dismissed.”
