Former D.A. advisor’s trial put on hold by appeals court: What’s next?

A California appeals court is taking a closer look at the criminal prosecution of a former top district attorney’s office advisor, asking state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office to further justify the case in court before deciding whether to let it move forward.

Earlier this year, then-D.A. advisor Diana Teran was charged with 11 felonies after state prosecutors said she violated California hacking statutes. Teran is accused of sending court records to a colleague in 2021 as part of an effort to track cops with disciplinary histories. The state has argued that Teran knew about the records only because she had access to confidential disciplinary files when she worked at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department three years earlier.

A trial, which state prosecutors estimated would take three weeks, had been slated to start in January. But on Monday, the Court of Appeal delayed that proceeding 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 for prosecutors to argue why the higher court should let the case continue instead of siding with the defense team’s request to throw it out.

Appeals Court’s Unusual Move

“We are grateful the Court of Appeal agreed to evaluate this question before trial,” James Spertus, one of the attorneys representing Teran, told The Times. “I said this at the start of the case: The only thing she shared was public court records. Public records belong to the public, not the LASD.” Bonta’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and founder of Fair and Just Prosecution, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform, said the appeals court’s decision was a rare move. “It’s not the sort of thing where the Court of Appeal will usually step in at this stage of the case,” she told The Times. “It now puts the A.G.’s office on the defensive.”

The Allegations and the Defense

The allegations at the center of the case date to 2018, when Teran worked as a constitutional policing advisor for then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell. Her usual duties included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. After leaving the Sheriff’s Department, Teran later joined the district attorney’s office. While there, in April 2021, she sent court records related to roughly three dozen deputies to a subordinate to evaluate for possible inclusion in internal databases prosecutors use to track officers with histories of dishonesty and other misconduct.

One is known as the Brady database — a reference to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brady vs. Maryland, which says prosecutors are required to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct. The attorney general’s office alleged several of the names Teran sent to her subordinate were those of deputies whose files she had accessed while working at the Sheriff’s Department years earlier.

Arguments and Legal Proceedings

However, testimony during a preliminary hearing in August showed she did not download the information from the Sheriff’s Department personnel file system. In most cases, she learned of the alleged misconduct when co-workers emailed her copies of court records from lawsuits filed by deputies hoping to overturn the department’s discipline against them. State investigators said they found that 11 of the names hadn’t been mentioned in public records or major media outlets. Prosecutors said they believed that meant Teran wouldn’t have been able to identify the deputies or know to look for their court records were it not for her special access while working at the Sheriff’s Department.

Prosecutors eventually dropped three of the charges without explanation, and Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta tossed out two, saying there was no evidence Teran tracked or checked on those deputies’ disciplinary cases while she was at the Sheriff’s Department. For the six charges that remain pending, Ohta said Teran could have searched for the deputies’ names in the department’s confidential personnel data system after she was emailed the records in question. Those searches could show a link between the public records and confidential information, he said.

In October, lawyers for Teran argued in a filing to the Court of Appeal that there was not enough probable cause to continue the prosecution. The 54-page filing said that Ohta had agreed the records Teran sent her colleague were public documents, and contended that she did not need permission from the Sheriff’s Department to use the records. The attorney general’s office filed a response that called the records “LASD data” and said “LASD is logically the only entity that could give anyone permission to use LASD’s data.” Someone in Teran’s position “reasonably would have known she could not use LASD’s data at another agency without LASD’s permission,” the state’s attorneys wrote.

On Monday, barely a week before trial was slated to begin, the appeals court issued its order to set the hearing for April 2 in Los Angeles.