Firm Wins Dismissal of Criminal Charges Against Top Adviser at District Attorney's Office

June 26, 2025 – The Firm obtained a complete dismissal of all charges for our client, Diana Teran, a top adviser to the Los Angeles District Attorney (LADA). The highly publicized, first-of-its-kind prosecution of Ms. Teran sought to criminalize Ms. Teran’s use of public materials in the furtherance of her duties as a prosecutor. The Firm’s appeal on behalf of Ms. Teran resulted in a 26-page published opinion and a complete victory for Ms. Teran.

Diana Teran was employed by LADA and held a senior position as Special Advisor. Her responsibilities included supervising the LADA Discovery Compliance Unit (DCU), which maintained the LADA’s Brady and ORWITS databases containing peace officer disciplinary findings for prosecutors to access in their individual cases to comply with their constitutional Brady obligations in each case. Ms. Teran had Los Angeles Superior Court decisions from public judicial writ proceedings that she obtained when she was previously employed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) from 2015 through 2018. On April 26, 2021, Ms. Teran emailed the judicial decisions to a colleague in the DCU asking her colleague to review the decisions to determine whether any information from the court cases should be entered into the Brady or ORWITS databases pursuant to LADA written policy. On April 24, 2024, the Attorney General charged Ms. Teran with 11 felony counts alleging that, by sending the PDFs of judicial decisions to her DCU colleague on April 26, 2021, Ms. Teran violated a criminal statute by emailing (using) data “belonging to” the LASD without first obtaining LASD permission.

Ms. Teran moved the trial court to dismiss the charges, arguing that the PDFs she emailed to a colleague did not “belong to” the LASD. The judicial decisions were public records that belonged to the public, not the LASD. The trial court denied motions to dismiss and held Ms. Teran to answer most of the charges at trial. On behalf of Ms. Teran, the Firm filed a Petition with the Court of Appeal seeking review of the trial court’s rulings, and the Court of Appeal granted the Petition, and found “the People’s construction of section 502(c)(2) is unreasonable” and ordered the charges dismissed. In granting the Petition the Court of Appeal ruled that “the People’s position opens the door to arbitrary application of criminal liability . . . .” The Court rejected the Attorney General’s argument that Ms. Teran’s conduct violated LASD policy and held that if “the viability of criminal prosecutions under section 502(c)(2) turns on the entity’s policies and warnings, there will be additional arbitrariness in criminal prosecutions across different public and private enterprises.”

The decision will have far-reaching impact on thousands of California residents who, but for this opinion, would otherwise fear criminal prosecution for their use of publicly available data.