One legal expert called it “a load of nonsense.” Another said it raised more questions than it answered.
But two months after state prosecutors announced 11 felony charges against a top adviser to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, a newly unsealed court record provides a glimpse into the controversial case.
The basis for charges against Gascón adviser Diana Teran by California Attorney General Rob Bonta remained unclear. These were announced in April,
State prosecutors have said only that Teran improperly accessed confidential police records while working as a constitutional policing adviser for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in 2018, then improperly used data from those records when she joined the district attorney’s office three years later.
It is unclear whose files he allegedly used and how, but after weeks of legal battles, a lawyer revealed whose files he used. Los Angeles Public Press Persuaded the judge to unseal the affidavit used to justify the arrest warrant.
The 15-page document released late Tuesday shows the main allegations center on Teran’s efforts to add more deputies’ names to the district attorney’s database used to track problematic officers, as his attorney previously speculated.
But the document also shows that records of disciplinary actions against at least two of the 11 deputies were already public when she flagged them for inclusion. This week, The Times found that the records were easily found through a Google search.
The identities of nine other deputies were still kept secret in the public version of the affidavit — though Teran’s attorney said he’s “99% confident” their records are also already public.
“I can’t believe a case would be filed based on this type of evidence,” James Spertus told the Times. “I’ve already told you how bad this case is.”
Several legal experts who reviewed the affidavit on Wednesday raised questions about the matter.
“I think we’ve lost the forest for the trees from a broader criminal justice perspective,” said Hanni Fakhouri, a San Francisco attorney whose background is in computer crimes. “It’s not like she’s putting people in the database who shouldn’t be there.”
Bonta’s office declined to comment in an emailed statement, citing the need to “protect the integrity” of the pending case.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case — who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record — said the state was considering dropping two charges against Teran, and Spertus confirmed late Wednesday that was his expectation as well.
The general election is still a few months away – in which Gascon faces a serious challenge – Some have taken Teran’s prosecution as a political betrayal, since Bonta had supported Gascón four years ago. But it’s unclear what impact the controversy will have on the race.
The D.A.’s office and the Sheriff’s Department did not immediately comment.
The 15-page affidavit signed by Special Agent Tony Baca traces the investigation into Teran to a traffic stop by another D.A. officer three years ago.
The affidavit does not name that officer, but details match the December 2021 arrest of Gascón’s chief of staff, Joseph Iñiguez.
As previously reported by The TimesAzusa police stopped Iniguez’s fiancée when he made an illegal U-turn at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Police said Iniguez tried to intervene during the stop, and arrested him on suspicion of public intoxication.
The police union later claimed that Iniguez had threatened to add the arresting officer’s name to the district attorney’s so-called “Brady List,” which includes officers with problematic disciplinary histories. The name is a reference to a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant — including evidence of police misconduct.
Given the potential conflict of interest, the case against Iñiguez was turned over to the California Department of Justice. But state prosecutors never pursued charges, and Iñiguez eventually sued the Azusa Police Department. The case was settled last year,
According to Baca’s affidavit, the state’s investigation somehow led authorities to Teran, who had responsibility for the DA’s Brady database. The state DOJ has not offered any further explanation.
Spertus previously said he believed the investigation into his client was sparked by a complaint from former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who said in 2019 he alerted the FBI and state DOJ to a “massive data breach” involving Teran. At the time, neither agency agreed to take the case.
When Teran worked at the sheriff’s department under Villanueva’s predecessor, her normal duties included access to confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. According to Baca’s affidavit, the department’s secret tracking software logged all of her searches starting in 2018.
When she joined the DA’s office in 2021, Teran allegedly began suggesting the names of deputies who should be added to the Brady list — a practice that two prosecutors told Baca was not normal. Then in April 2021, the affidavit says, Teran sent a list of 33 names to another prosecutor for possible inclusion in the DA database.
The affidavit said many of these names were those of deputy sheriffs whose files she had seen previously while working for the sheriff’s department, and that she otherwise “would not have been able to identify so many deputy sheriffs.” The affidavit also alleged Some of the documents Teran sent with the names “appear to have been scanned, copied, or taken directly from LASD data files.”
Baca wrote that these 11 allegations are against 11 of the 33 deputies whose names “did not appear in public records request responses nor in media articles.”
Susan Seeger, the attorney fighting to release the records, questioned that logic.
“This is a ridiculously narrow and inaccurate way to determine whether their disciplinary files are confidential,” he wrote in an emailed statement.
Seeger called it “astonishing” that Bonta had designated the 11 deputies’ records as confidential, and pointed out that two names — Liza Gonzalez and Thomas Negron — were not redacted in the released affidavit.
“Bonta’s office did not explain why it unsealed those two names, but it is probably because there are two California Court of Appeal decisions from 2014 and 2015 that go into detail about Deputies Gonzalez’s and Negron’s disciplinary files and how they were fired for dishonesty in 2010 and 2011, respectively,” Seeger wrote.
Other legal experts who reviewed the affidavit had similar criticisms.
Police oversight expert Michael Gennaco said, “I think it raises more questions than it answers — partly because there are still redactions to be made.” He also said it was “interesting” that the investigator who wrote the affidavit had not worked a case like this before.
Christine Soto DeBerry, executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance, criticized the case as “absurd.”
“If a prosecutor is honestly trying to do his or her job and uncover important information, he or she should be applauded, not punished,” he said in an emailed statement.
Fakhouri, a lawyer with a background in computer crimes, said state prosecutors are not claiming that any of the information Teran marked for inclusion in the Brady database was inaccurate or didn’t belong there.
“It also seems to me that there is no allegation that she did not have computer access to records at least while she was employed at the sheriff’s department,” he said. “So unauthorized access means she took information that she was allowed to have and used it after she left the sheriff’s department.”
Fakhouri said federal prosecutors have tried to argue the theory that “unauthorized access” would include cases similar to Teran’s, in which someone accessed data for a permitted purpose and later used it for another purpose. But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected that theory, he said, and the California Supreme Court has not considered how broadly the state statute should be interpreted.
“It’s a weird case. To be honest, I think it’s kind of nonsense,” he said.
He said that, legally, it doesn’t matter whether the records are already public or not — though that could raise bigger questions about the decision to prosecute Teran.
He wondered if it might have a “deterrent effect” on other prosecutors focused on police accountability: “Is this really what we want, this kind of legislation and this kind of investigation?”
Times staff writers James Queally and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
