Advisor to L.A. County district attorney pleads not guilty to 11 felonies over use of sheriff’s records
A top advisor to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón pleaded not guilty on Thursday after state prosecutors said she illegally used confidential personnel records three years ago when she flagged several sheriff’s deputies’ names for possible inclusion on a list of problem officers.
The lawyer representing Diana Teran argued in court that the charges against her didn’t constitute a crime because maintaining a list of deputies accused of misconduct was part of her job overseeing the district attorney’s ethics and integrity operations.
“This is just talking about basic common sense,” James Spertus, Teran’s attorney, said in court. “Is it a crime to do your job internally at the D.A.’s office for the county when you have information in your head?”
Prosecutors with the California Department of Justice said it was too early in the legal process to grapple with those details. For now, the state said, the two sides could argue only over the contents of the criminal complaint filed against her, and not the other documents used to justify it.
Under former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, detectives secretly investigated and urged the state attorney general to prosecute a Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote on a leaked list of problem deputies.
After listening to several hours of legal wrangling, L.A. Superior Court Judge Charlaine Olmedo sided with the state and moved forward with Teran’s arraignment.
On Thursday, the judge also rejected requests — from an attorney for the news site Los Angeles Public Press — to unseal documents that could show the deputies’ records were already public. Unsealing those documents, Olmedo said, could violate an existing protective order.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed the criminal complaint against Teran in April, and the allegations at the center of the politically charged case date to 2018, when she worked at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a constitutional police advisor. Part of her duties there included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations.
The department’s secret tracking software kept records of the more than 1,600 personnel files she searched for and reviewed, according to an affidavit state prosecutors filed in court this year.
After leaving the Sheriff’s Department, Teran joined the district attorney’s office. It’s not clear what her current status is, but a spokesperson for the office previously said she was no longer overseeing ethics and integrity operations.
While at the district attorney’s office in 2021, state prosecutors allege, Teran sent a list of 33 names and supporting documents to a fellow deputy district attorney for possible inclusion in a so-called Brady database, which contains 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.
The affidavit says that several of the names Teran emailed to fellow prosecutor Pamela Revel were deputies whose files she’d accessed while working at the Sheriff’s Department. Eleven of them hadn’t been mentioned in the news or in public records — so she allegedly wouldn’t have been able to identify them otherwise, state prosecutors said.
A look inside former Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s multi-year investigation shows investigators relentlessly pursued a probe focused on supposedly stolen records and document leaks.
After fighting for more than two months to get the affidavit revealing the names of all 11 deputies, earlier this month Spertus filed hundreds of pages of documents that he said showed their disciplinary records were already public in court records and news articles.
“From the moment this case was filed, I was suspicious of what the motive [for filing it] was because there’s no crime and release of the affidavit confirms that,” Spertus said at the time. “The underlying theory is that she stole public information.”
On Thursday, Susan Seager — the attorney representing LA Public Press — argued that hundreds of pages of documents Spertus filed should be made public. The judge disagreed, saying that the only reason Spertus knew to look for the names of certain deputies and find those records was because he had access to protected information.
“It’s disappointing that the Superior Court didn’t recognize that these are public court records and they should be unsealed and shown to the public,” Seager told The Times after court Thursday. “If the DOJ is criminally prosecuting a prosecutor for using public records, that seems to suggest that anyone using public records to research bad sheriff’s deputies is subject to criminal prosecution.”
Olmedo decided that at this stage the court could only rely on information within the “four corners” of the criminal complaint. After taking Teran’s plea, Olmedo set a preliminary hearing for Aug. 7.
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