Appeals Court tosses case against assistant DA accused of improper data access

A state appeals court panel on Thursday, June 26, 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.

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 said that the 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 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 the state Attorney General’s Office.

Teran allegedly accessed computer data, including numerous confidential peace officer files, from an internal sheriff’s 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.

“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,” the ruling says.

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.”