One legal expert called it “nonsense,” while another said it simply raises more questions than it answers.
But two months after state prosecutors announced 11 felony charges against a top Los Angeles County district counsel. Lawyer. George Gascón, a newly revealed court file offers a window into the controversial case.
The basis of the accusations against Gascón's advisor, Diana Terán, had remained opaque since the California Atty case. General Rob Bonta announced them in April.
State prosecutors have said only that Teran improperly accessed confidential police records while working as a constitutional law enforcement adviser for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in 2018, and then misused data from those records when she joined the district attorney’s office three years later.
It's unclear what files he allegedly used or how, but after weeks of legal wrangling, a lawyer for the Los Angeles Public Press He convinced a judge to unseal the affidavit used to justify the arrest warrant.
The 15-page document, unsealed Tuesday night, shows that the main allegations center on Teran's efforts to include more officer names in district attorney databases used to track problem officers, such as his lawyer had previously speculated.
But the document also shows that disciplinary records against at least two of the 11 deputies were already public when she flagged them for inclusion. This week, The Times discovered that the records were easily located through a Google search.
The identities of the other nine deputies were still redacted in the public version of the affidavit, although Terán's lawyer said he was “99% sure” their records were also public.
“I can't believe a case has been brought with this kind of evidence,” James Spertus told the Times. “I previously underestimated how serious this case was.”
On Wednesday, several legal experts who reviewed the affidavit raised questions about the case.
“It strikes me that we've lost the forest for the trees from a broader criminal justice standpoint,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a San Francisco attorney with experience in cybercrimes. “It's not like I'm putting people in the database who shouldn't be there.”
In an emailed statement, Bonta's office declined to comment, citing the need to “protect the integrity” of a pending case.
A law enforcement source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said the state is considering dropping two of the charges against Teran, and on Wednesday night, Spertus confirmed that was his expectation as well.
Months before the general elections, in which Gascón faces a serious rival, some have taken Terán's prosecution as a political betrayal, because Bonta supported Gascón four years ago. But it's unclear what impact the controversy will have on the race, if any.
The district attorney's office and Sheriff's Department did not immediately offer comment.
The 15-page affidavit signed by Special Agent Tony Baca of the state Department of Justice traces the investigation into Teran to a traffic stop involving another district attorney's official three years ago.
The affidavit does not identify that official, but the details match the December 2021 arrest of Gascón's chief of staff, Joseph Iniguez.
As previously reported by The TimesAzusa police stopped Iniguez's fiancé after he allegedly made an illegal U-turn into a McDonald's drive-thru. Police said Iniguez attempted to interfere with the stop and arrested him on suspicion of public intoxication.
The police union later alleged that Iniguez threatened to add the arresting officer's name to the district attorney's so-called Brady List, which contains officers with problematic disciplinary records. 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.
Given the potential conflict of interest, the case against Íñiguez was turned over to the California Department of Justice. But state prosecutors never filed charges, and Iñiguez eventually sued the Azusa Police Department in a case case that was resolved last year.
According to Baca's affidavit, the state's investigation somehow led officials to Teran, who was responsible for the district attorney's Brady database. The Justice Department has not offered any further explanation.
Spertus previously said he believed the investigation into his client was sparked by a complaint from former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who said in 2019 that he alerted the FBI and the state Department of Justice about a “massive data breach” involving Teran. At that time, neither agency agreed to take on the case.
When Terán worked at the Sheriff's Department under Villanueva's predecessor, part of his regular duties included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. According to Baca's affidavit, the department's secret tracking software recorded all searches for him starting in 2018.
When he joined the district attorney's office in 2021, Terán allegedly began suggesting names of deputies who should be added to the Brady list, a practice that two prosecutors told Baca was unusual. Then, in April 2021, the affidavit says, Terán sent a list of 33 names to another prosecutor for possible inclusion in databases.
The affidavit says that several of those names were deputies whose files he had accessed while working at the Sheriff's Department, and that he would otherwise “not have identified so many of these sheriff's deputies.” The affidavit also alleges that some of the documents Terán sent along with the names appeared to have been “scanned, copied or taken directly from LASD data files.”
The 11 charges, Baca wrote, reflected the 11 of those 33 deputies whose names “did not appear in public records or in press articles.”
Susan Seager, the attorney who fought for the record's release, disputed that reasoning.
“This is a ridiculously limited and inaccurate way to determine whether your disciplinary records are confidential,” he wrote in an emailed statement.
Seager went on to call it “surprising” that Bonta described the records of the 11 agents as confidential, noting that two names, Liza Gonzalez and Thomas Negron, were not redacted in the released affidavit.
“Bonta's office does not explain why he released those two names,” Seager wrote, “but perhaps that is because there are two California appeals court decisions dated 2014 and 2015 that go into great detail in the disciplinary files of the agents González and Negron and how they were fired for dishonesty in 2010 and 2011, respectively.”
Other legal experts who reviewed the affidavit were equally critical.
“I think it raises more questions than it answers, in part because there are still censorships,” said police oversight expert Michael Gennaco, adding that it was “interesting” that the investigator who authored the affidavit didn't appear to have made a case for this. guy. nature before.
Cristine Soto DeBerry, executive director of the Alliance of Prosecutors, criticized the “absurdity” of the case.
“A prosecutor who seriously tries to do her job and track down important information should be applauded, not punished,” he said in an emailed statement.
Fakhoury, the experienced computer crimes attorney, noted that state prosecutors do not appear to be claiming that the information Teran flagged for inclusion in the Brady database was incorrect or did not belong there.
“It also seems to me that there is no allegation that she did not have computer access to the records, at least when she was employed by the Sheriff's Department,” he said. “So the unauthorized access is that she took the information that she was allowed to have and used it after she left the Sheriff's Department.”
Fakhoury said federal prosecutors have tried to argue the theory that “unauthorized access” would include cases similar to Teran's, in which someone accessed data for a permitted purpose and then used it for a different purpose. But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected that theory, she said, and the California Supreme Court has not weighed in on how broadly the state statute should be interpreted.
“It's a strange case,” he said. “I think it's kind of silly, frankly.”
Legally, he said, it might not matter if the records were already public, although that could raise larger questions about the decision to prosecute Terán.
He wondered if it could have a “chilling effect” on other prosecutors focused on police accountability: “Is this what we really want this type of statute and this type of investigation to pursue?”
Times staff writers James Queally and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
