A California appeals court is taking a closer look at the criminal prosecution of a former top state attorney general, asking state Atty. The office of Gen. Rob Bonta will continue to defend the case in court before deciding whether to move forward.
Earlier this year, then-DA counsel Diana Teran was charged with 11 counts cases after federal prosecutors said he violated California's racketeering statutes. 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 argued that Teran only knew about the records because he had access to confidential disciplinary files while working for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department three years earlier.
The trial, which federal prosecutors estimate will last three weeks, was expected to begin in January. But on Monday, the Court of Appeal delayed that for at least three months – and left open the possibility of dismissing the case entirely.
The court issued a two-page order to show cause, setting an April hearing where prosecutors will argue why the high court should allow the case to proceed instead of complying with the defense team's request to dismiss it.
“We are grateful that the Court of Appeals has agreed to examine this question before the trial,” James Spertus, one of Teran's attorneys, told The Times on Monday. “I said this at the beginning of the trial: The only thing he shared was the court records. Public records belong to the public, not LASD. “
Bonta's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Miriam Krinsky, a former prosecutor and founder of Fair and Just Prosecution, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform, said the appeals court's decision was an unusual step.
“It's not the kind of thing that the Court of Appeal would normally get into at this stage of the case,” he told The Times on Monday. “Now it's making the AG's office defend itself.”
The allegations at the center of the case date to 2018, when Teran served as a police consultant to then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell's constitution. His regular duties included obtaining secret records and internal affairs investigations.
After leaving the Sheriff's Department, Teran later joined the district attorney's office. While there, in April 2021, he sent court records related to about thirty-two deputies to a subordinate to assess whether they could be included in an internal database used by prosecutors to track officers with a history of dishonesty and other misconduct.
One is known as the Brady database – a reference to the 1963 US Supreme Court decision Brady vs. Maryland, which states that prosecutors are required to turn over any evidence in favor of the defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.
The attorney general's office alleges that many of the names Teran sent to a subordinate were those whose files deputies obtained while working for the Sheriff's Department years ago.
However, the evidence during a hearing in August indicated that he did not release the information from the Sheriff's Department personnel file system. In many cases, he hears about allegations of misconduct when colleagues email him copies of court records in cases that deputies filed in hopes of overturning departmental sanctions against them.
Federal investigators said they found that 11 of these names had not been mentioned in public records or in the mainstream media. Prosecutors said they believe that means Teran wouldn't have been able to identify the deputies or know to look at their court records if it weren't for his special access while working for the Sheriff's Department.
Prosecutors ended up dropping three charges without explanation, while Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta dismissed two, saying there was no evidence Teran tracked down or looked into disciplinary cases against those deputies while at the Sheriff's Department.
Of the six pending cases, Ohta said Teran could have searched the deputies' names in the department's confidential personnel database after the records were emailed to him. That search could show connections between public records and private information, he said.
In October, Teran's lawyers argued to the Court of Appeal that there was insufficient cause to continue the prosecution. The 54-page letter said Ohta had acknowledged that the records Teran sent to his colleague were public records, and argued that he did not need the Administration Department's permission to use the records.
The attorney general's office filed a response that called the records “LASD data” and said that “LASD is reasonably the only entity that can give anyone permission to use LASD data.”
Someone in Teran's position “would have reasonably known that they could not use LASD data for another agency without LASD's consent,” state attorneys wrote.
On Monday, one week before the trial was due to begin, the appeals court ordered a hearing for April 2 in Los Angeles.
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