By Vanguard Staff
LOS ANGELES — A California appellate court has dismissed criminal charges against Diana Teran, a former ethics adviser in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, ruling that the state attorney general improperly invoked a computer crime statute to prosecute her for sharing public court records.
In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel on the California Court of Appeal found that Teran could not be held criminally liable under laws meant to prohibit hacking and tampering with computer systems for simply disseminating information already available to the public.
“The legislature never intended this statute — which is principally aimed at computer hacking and tampering — to be used to criminally prosecute disclosure of purely public information that happened to be stored on a computer,” Associate Justice Carl Moor wrote in the opinion.
“These court documents convey nothing that a member of the public could not learn by sitting in a courtroom attending the court proceedings or reviewing publicly available information from the court’s docket and files,” Moor added.
The ruling ends a controversial prosecution brought by Attorney General Rob Bonta, who accused Teran of unlawfully accessing confidential sheriff’s department files during her tenure as a constitutional policing adviser with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and using them later in her role at the DA’s office under George Gascón.
According to Bonta’s complaint, Teran allegedly accessed data on deputy disciplinary proceedings in 2018 and later used that knowledge to determine whether certain deputies should be flagged in the office’s Brady database — a resource for identifying law enforcement officers with credibility issues that must be disclosed to the defense in criminal cases.
Teran, however, maintained that she only shared information drawn from publicly available civil case decisions, specifically those filed by deputies who were contesting disciplinary actions. The appellate court agreed with her defense, calling into question the legal basis of the prosecution itself.
The court’s decision to intervene before a trial — a relatively rare move — reflected its deep concern over the implications of Bonta’s interpretation of the statute, which judges said could expose tens of thousands of public employees across California to criminal liability for sharing public information.
The Attorney General’s Office did not immediately comment on the ruling.
The Prosecutors Alliance of California, a reform-minded coalition that includes prosecutors and victims’ rights advocates, celebrated the court’s decision and criticized the prosecution as a misuse of state law.
“Today’s decision confirms what we’ve known from the very beginning: the case against Diana Teran was deeply flawed and legally baseless,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, the Alliance’s executive director. “It was an attempt to criminalize a public servant simply for carrying out her ethical and constitutional responsibilities to disclose evidence of police misconduct.”
Teran had worked as the assistant district attorney for ethics and integrity in Gascón’s administration, a role that included oversight of prosecutorial obligations under Brady v. Maryland, which requires the disclosure of evidence favorable to the defense, including prior misconduct by law enforcement witnesses.
Gascón, who was voted out of office in 2024, faced repeated opposition from law enforcement unions and political opponents over his efforts to reform the office’s approach to prosecuting police misconduct.
