By Keri Blakinger
Los Angeles Times Diana Teran online news
(Los Angeles Times) — Four months after California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced a slew of felony charges against a top advisor to the Los Angeles County district attorney, state prosecutors this week dropped three of the 11 counts but still pushed forward toward a trial.
Diana Teran, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department advisor who later oversaw ethics and integrity operations at the D.A.’s office, is accused of illegally using confidential personnel records. State prosecutors allege Teran broke the law three years ago when she flagged several sheriff’s deputies’ names for possible inclusion on an internal district attorney’s database of officers accused of misconduct.
According to state prosecutors, Teran only knew the deputies’ names and alleged misdeeds in her role at the D.A.’s office because she’d accessed their records in 2018 while still working at the Sheriff’s Department.
Last month, Teran pleaded not guilty on all counts. According to her lawyer, James Spertus, the deputies’ records were already public in court cases and other records.
Though the two sides have sparred in dozens of legal filings over the last few months, a preliminary hearing will determine whether there’s enough evidence to move ahead to trial — the first real face-off in court.
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The hearing was scheduled to begin Wednesday, but prosecutors said they weren’t ready and hadn’t asked their witnesses to show up. On Thursday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta voiced his skepticism about the state’s theories and questioned the point of pursuing the case at all.
“I don’t see this sort of factual scenario repeating all this often,” he said. “Part of criminal law is to deter criminal conduct in the future so what are we trying to deter here?”
The allegations at the center of the case date back to 2018 when Teran worked as a constitutional police advisor for then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell. Part of her usual duties included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations.
The department used secret tracking software that kept records of the more than 1,600 personnel files she searched for and reviewed, according to an affidavit state prosecutors filed in court earlier this year.
After leaving the Sheriff’s Department in late 2018, Teran joined the district attorney’s office, where state prosecutors allege in 2021 she sent a list of 33 names and supporting documents to another prosecutor 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 several of the names Teran emailed to fellow prosecutor Pamela Revel were deputies whose files she had accessed while working at the Sheriff’s Department. After searching news articles and public records requests, a state investigator found that 11 of the names hadn’t been mentioned in public, which led to the allegation that Teran wouldn’t have been able to identify them were it not for her special access working at the SheriffDepartment.
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For months, the state has resisted releasing the names of the 11 deputies, asking for protective orders at every step. When Bonta’s office agreed to release information earlier this year, prosecutors still left nine of the names redacted. Only the names of Liza Gonzalez and Thomas Negron — former deputies who court records show were fired for dishonesty — were made public, a move the state has not explained.
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This week, when Bonta’s office filed an updated version of the criminal complaint, the charges were dropped relating to Gonzalez, Negron and one other deputy, identified only as Deputy Doe 11 in court filings. Prosecutors did not explain why they dropped those three charges, and the DOJ did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
After court, Spertus told The Times that Deputy Doe 11 was a civilian employee, not a deputy.
The judge, Ohta, said in court that state prosecutors had also added “aggravating factors” to the complaint, but court staff told The Times the document would not be available in court records until next week. The DOJ did not respond to a request for a copy of the document.
Much of Thursday’s hearing was devoted to hearing testimony from Deputy Todd Bernstein, who spoke extensively about which files Teran had accessed during her time at the Sheriff’s Department and which ones she’d received information about in emails.
He also testified that most Sheriff’s Department information is confidential under policy and that public information — including public court records — would be considered confidential once sent to the department, such as in an email attachment.
To Spertus, that testimony revealed how “legally untenable” the state’s position appears.
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“Their view of the case is when someone from outside the Sheriff’s Department emails a public record to someone inside the department it becomes a private record,” he told The Times afterward. “It is uncontroverted that the data allegedly taken was from Los Angeles Superior Court pleadings emailed to someone at LASD, which then became LASD data.”
Those emailed public court records, he said, are the materials Teran is accused of flagging for inclusion in the Brady database.
One line of questioning in court Thursday echoed some of the allegations raised in a similar case that Bonta’s office declined to prosecute earlier this year. As The Times reported last month, after Alex Villanueva was elected L.A. County sheriff in December 2018, his administration launched an investigation into leaked records and allegedly stolen personnel files.
One part of that probe included claims that both Teran and officials with the Office of Inspector General had downloaded a large number of deputy personnel records — including those of Villanueva and several of his close associates — in the final days before Villanueva took office. The 306-page Sheriff’s Department case file reviewed by The Times did not clarify why that would be considered a crime.
At one point a legal advisor for the county called the probe “not legally viable” and over the course of several years state and federal prosecutors repeatedly turned it down, according to the documents reviewed by The Times. But in 2021 the department again floated the matter to state prosecutors, sending them a letter and case file outlining allegations that Teran, her assistant Alan Wang, two oversight officials and a Times reporter had participated in several felonies. In May of this year Bonta’s office formally rejected the case and declined to file charges.
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On Thursday, though, state prosecutors asked Bernstein several questions about records Teran had accessed in the final days before Villanueva took office.
“There were a number of cases viewed and accessed by Ms. Teran that were for high-level department executives that had not been in the field for years,” Bernstein said. “It defies logic as to why one would need to look up cases that are 20 years old for someone that is a department executive or are not even employed by the department.”
When questioned about whether he’d ever asked Teran why she’d accessed so many files, Bernstein said he had not.
“Without talking to her,” Spertus said, “how do you know what she needs to do her job?”
Toward the end of the testimony, Spertus asked Bernstein whether he had participated in referring the case to the attorney general, and Bernstein said that he had not.
But a Times review of the case file showed that, as one of the department’s technology and computing experts, Bernstein had a key role in the investigation. According to the case file, he was one of the members of the Villanueva transition team that discovered “abnormalities” while reviewing personnel records and eventually sparked the criminal investigation sent to the state Department of Justice.
Bernstein, whose personnel records were among those allegedly accessed by oversight officials, did not respond to an emailed request for comment Thursday evening.
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