LOS ANGELES – A state appeals court panel Thursday ordered the dismissal of charges against a Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who previously worked with the sheriff’s department and was accused of improperly accessing and disseminating confidential deputy personnel files.
In a 24-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal disagreed with prosecutors’ application of the state law governing access and use of computer data, noting that the material obtained and shared by Diana Teran relating to disciplinary cases of several sheriff’s deputies was publicly available from other sources.
The panel opined that court documents in question “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 dockets and files.”
Teran was charged in April 2024 by the California Department of Justice with violating a state law prohibiting the use of data from a government computer system without permission, according to a statement released by the state Attorney General’s Office.
Teran allegedly accessed computer data, including numerous confidential peace officer files, from an internal sheriff’s department database in 2018 while working as a constitutional policing adviser at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then impermissibly used that data at the District Attorney’s Office after going to work there in January 2021, according to the A.G.’s Office.
But in its ruling Thursday, the appeals court panel rejected prosecutors’ interpretation of the state law being used as the basis for the criminal case.
“… 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,” according to the ruling.
The appellate panel noted that the information shared by Teran, even though it may have been stored in an internal access-restricted sheriff’s department file, was still public. Citing previous case law, the panel equated the prosecution theory to “a newspaper article being deemed confidential by being placed into a police officer’s personnel file.”
“Similarly, here we do not believe the Legislature intended to allow for criminal prosecution of an individual who shares a public court document just because the document had been stored as data on, and then retrieved by the individual from, LASD’s (internal computer system),” the panel wrote. “The placement of a public record in a particular file on a computer database does not transform a purely public court record into one over which a criminal prosecution then becomes possible when someone with computer access uses the document without permission of the owner of the computer.”
