A high official from the Los Angeles County district lawyer’s workplace is asking a decide to toss out 11 felony costs filed towards her by state prosecutors, together with her lawyer arguing in a courtroom submitting that the allegedly confidential recordsdata she’s accused of misusing had been really public data.
In April, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta accused Diana Teran, then a high advisor to Dist. Atty. George Gascón, of illegally utilizing confidential data about 11 sheriff’s deputies when she flagged their names for inclusion in a database utilized by prosecutors to maintain observe of officers accused of misconduct.
Inside hours of Bonta’s public announcement, Teran’s lawyer, James Spertus, stated that his shopper had executed nothing incorrect and that the data in query had been probably all public in current courtroom filings.
However as a result of state prosecutors requested to maintain the deputies’ names secret, for 2 months Spertus couldn’t show it. Then final week, a Los Angeles County Superior Court docket decide unsealed a key doc, together with an unredacted model for the protection filed beneath seal.
The general public model of the doc — an affidavit used to justify the costs towards Teran — revealed the names of two deputies, each of whom had disciplinary histories simply discovered by way of a Google search. In accordance with Spertus’ newest courtroom submitting, the unredacted model revealed that data regarding the 9 different deputies had been already public as effectively.
“From the second this case was filed, I used to be suspicious of what the motive [for filing it] was as a result of there’s no crime and launch of the affidavit confirms that,” Spertus advised The Occasions late Monday. “The underlying concept is that she stole public info.”
The California Division of Justice didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Teran had been scheduled to enter a plea Monday morning. However the decide rescheduled after state prosecutors stated they wanted time to reply to Spertus’ submitting.
A lot of the temporary listening to targeted as an alternative on the a whole bunch of pages of attachments Spertus filed, which he stated had been all publicly accessible courtroom data. State prosecutors questioned whether or not Spertus was allowed to file them publicly based mostly on his data of the 9 redacted names.
Prosecutors didn’t handle the substance of Spertus’ submitting however accused him in courtroom of creating an finish run round a protecting order. The decide determined to go away these attachments sealed in the intervening time.
The allegations on the middle of the case date to at the least 2018, when Teran labored on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Division as a constitutional police advisor. A part of her normal duties there included accessing confidential deputy data and inner affairs investigations. The division’s secret monitoring software program logged all of her searches and stored data of the greater than 1,600 personnel recordsdata she looked for and reviewed, in accordance with the affidavit unsealed final week.
Teran served as assistant district lawyer over ethics and integrity operations. A spokesperson for the district lawyer’s workplace beforehand stated in an announcement that Teran was not in that function, with no additional clarification provided.
After she joined the workplace in 2021, the affidavit says, Teran despatched an inventory of 33 names and supporting paperwork to a different prosecutor for potential inclusion in a so-called Brady database, which comprises officers with problematic disciplinary histories. The identify is a reference to a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court docket resolution that requires prosecutors to show over any proof favorable to a defendant, together with proof of police misconduct.
The affidavit says that a number of of the names Teran emailed to fellow prosecutor Pamela Revel had been deputies whose recordsdata she’d accessed whereas working on the Sheriff’s Division, and that she “wouldn’t have recognized so many of those deputy sheriffs” in any other case.
The 11 felony costs mirrored the 11 of these 33 deputies whose names the affidavit stated did “not seem in both public data request responses or media articles.”
However, as first reported by the Los Angeles Public Press, the 2 names left unredacted final week within the public model of the affidavit had been these of deputies whose disciplinary data had been already brazenly accessible by way of different means. After they appealed their firings for dishonesty within the early 2010s, their disciplinary histories had been mentioned intimately in publicly accessible courtroom selections a number of years later.
After lastly studying the remaining 9 names on Thursday, Spertus argued on this week’s submitting that all the deputies had equally accessible data.
“The Lawyer Common’s whole concept of guilt relies on the allegation that Ms. Teran hooked up private paperwork to her April 26, 2021, e-mail, but the affiant apparently by no means regarded within the Los Angeles Superior Court docket recordsdata for the paperwork it alleges now had been private,” Spertus wrote. “Every of the 11 paperwork underlying the 11 counts within the Criticism is a doc that’s public and positioned in Los Angeles Superior Court docket case recordsdata.”
The Sheriff’s Division doesn’t “personal” public courtroom data, he argued, simply because they’re stored in Sheriff’s Division recordsdata.
“Ms. Teran wouldn’t want permission from the LASD to make use of a public document contained within the LASD databases, and she will use these public data for any objective,” Spertus wrote. “Merely acknowledged, the ‘use’ of public info can’t be a criminal offense.”
In his 40-page submitting, Spertus additionally raised issues about whether or not the case — stemming from materials accessed in 2018 — had already exceeded the three-year statute of limitations for the costs.
Teran is anticipated to return to courtroom on July 17, although her lawyer voiced frustration on the delay.
“It’s been a battle to determine what this case is about from the second it was filed,” he stated, “and as quickly as I can get this heard I count on it’ll be dismissed.”
