A controversial prosecution, a series of threats, & the struggle to provide genuine oversight for the nations largest sheriff’s department – Part 2

The case of Diana Teran

As described in Part 1 of this series, it was a controversial set of criminal charges filed against a longtime local prosecutor named Diana Teran, that inspired lawyer Sean Kennedy, and the rest of the members of the LA County Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission to file an amicus brief in support Teran.

As WLA readers of Part 1 will remember, the filing of the brief subsequently precipitated a series of threats and retaliatory actions on the part of Dawyn R. Harrison—who is the head of LA’s Office of the County Counsel.

In Part 2 we’re going to take a look at the case itself—which is quite literally without legal precedent—and the unusual set of circumstances that let to the charges being filed.

The case consists of eleven criminal charges that allege Teran illegally used her knowledge of the confidential disciplinary records of 11 deputies—records that she had previously been able to obtain legally while she was employed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Here is the series of events that led to the charges.

In December 2014, former Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell (who is now the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department) hired Diana Teran as the LASD’s first Constitutional Policing Adviser.

McDonnell had just been sworn in to lead the sheriff’s department earlier that month, and believed Teran was a promising choice given her professional background. Prior to her work for the LA County Sheriff, among her posts, Teran spent more than 10 years as a deputy district attorney, followed by another four years working for the county’s Office of Independent Review, which is the oversight agency that preceded the creation of the Civilian Oversight Commission—or COC.

When working for then Sheriff McDonnell, one of Teran’s jobs was to put together a “Brady” list for the new sheriff.  The point of such a list was to keep track of deputies with histories of misconduct such as lying on a report, and other acts of that nature, which could affect their credibility in court. In other words, this was the kind of information that might need to be disclosed to the defense as potential exculpatory evidence, under the rules of the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brady v. Maryland.

As she worked to assemble this list, Teran had access to confidential files in order to determine who belonged on the list that the sheriff had asked her to put together.

In December of 2017, McDonnell told reporters that he hoped to give the Brady list that he and Teran were compiling to prosecutors as a part of reforming and “restoring credibility” to the scandal-plagued department he was leading.

(As many Los Angeles residents will remember, McDonnell’s once popular predecessor, Lee Baca had been sentenced to prison the year before. And Baca’s notorious undersheriff Paul Tanaka, was sentenced a month later.)

McDonnell likely would have been able to accomplish his Brady goal, had his actions not been blocked by a lawsuit filed by ALADS—the union that represents the department’s deputies—which aimed to derail the sheriff’s Brady list project.

At first it appeared that the derailing might succeed when, in July 2017, a state appeals court ruled in favor of ALADS. But McDonnell immediately appealed that decision to the California Supreme Court.

“This is about respecting the rights of peace officers, and preserving the integrity of criminal cases,” Sheriff McDonnell told the CAL Supremes.

Near the end of August 2019, the California Supreme Court agreed with Sheriff McDonnell.

But by that time, however, McDonnell’s four year term was up and, although he ran for a second term in November 2018, he lost the race to newcomer Alex Villanueva.

Newly elected Sheriff Villanueva goes on a criminal investigation spree

Shortly after Villanueva was sworn in as sheriff, he fired Teran, along with a long list of others.

“He was on a quest to even the score with deputies and other people he didn’t like, or deputies who were friends with people he didn’t like…” wrote former Assistant Sheriff Bob Olmsted in an op ed for WLA, explaining the sheriffs actions.

In addition to the knee-jerk firings, during his early days in office Villanueva launched a “Civil Rights and Public Integrity Detail,” the main purpose of which appeared to be triggering criminal investigations of people against whom the new sheriff held some form of grudge.

To help with the new project, Villanueva lured controversial former LASD detective Mark Lillienfeld out of retirement, and appointed his second in command, Undersheriff Tim Murakami, to lead the endeavor.

Among those who suddenly found themselves on Villanueva’s hit list of people that Lillienfeld and Undersheriff Murakami were ordered to criminally investigate were Los Angeles County Inspector General Max Huntsman, County CEO Sachi Hamai, LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, Civilian Oversight Commission member Patti Giggans,  and LA Times reporter Maya Lau.

And there were more after that.

(At one bizarre moment, Villanueva’s hit list included Hollywood-producer-turned-youth-justice-advocate Scott Budnick.)

In mid-August of 2019, LASD Undersheriff Murakami upped the ante considerably when he sent a memo to the LA County Board of Supervisors, announcing that the department had opened a “criminal investigation” into Inspector General Max Huntsman for, among other things, “theft of confidential files, unlawful dissemination of confidential files, civil rights violations, and burglary,” all alleged crimes committed in the course of conducting oversight of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

Soon after the Huntsman announcement, Murakami disclosed that the LASD was also investigating Teran for a similar list of felonies, all having to do with the Brady files, although there was no evidence that any of the files were leaked to the press or improperly used in any other manner.

Yet Villanueva and his undersheriff continued their investigations.

As they did so, Huntsman and Teran appeared to find themselves stuck at the top of the list of people Villanueva wanted to see criminally charged, in part—it seemed—because the new sheriff believed that Teran and Huntsman in particular got in the way of his highly controversial campaign to rehire former deputy Carl Mandoyan.

(For those unfamiliar with the case of LA County Sheriff’s deputy Caren Carl Mandoyan, he was a deputy fired by the LASD in 2016 under former Sheriff Jim McDonnell, but was was rehired in early 2019 by Sheriff Alex Villanueva, despite his problematic background.)

The search for prosecutors

There was, however one major obstacle blocking the forward movement of what appeared to be vendetta-driven investigations, which was the fact that Villanueva and his team needed someone to agree to prosecute the cases.  But, when Villanueva’s team approached then-Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, the DA declined to participate. 

“He’s only targeting political enemies,” Gascón told LA Times reporter Alene Tchekmedyian, in Sept. 2021. 

By that time Teran was installed at the District Attorney’s office as a special advisor to the DA on “conviction review” matters, and “Brady compliance.” With the latter in mind, in April 2021, Teran sent court records pertaining to a group of deputies to her assistant with the request that the assistant evaluate the deputies for possible inclusion in internal Brady databases, while also keeping them confidential.

Meanwhile, Murakami and his team began prosecutor shopping.

In the case of Teran, the shopping included the FBI, where Lillienfeld made the pitch to Brandon Fox, then the chief of the Criminal Division of the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, who declined to take the case.

(As WLA readers may remember, several years earlier, Brandon Fox was the lead prosecutor in the corruption trials of former Sheriff Lee Baca, and former Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, plus a bunch of other department members, resulting in a list of convictions. So he was not unfamiliar with the world of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.)

After rejecting Lillienfeld’s pitch, federal prosecutor Fox offered to give Lillienfeld a “declination” letter, which is typically a formal document that memorializes the agency’s decision not to pursue a criminal investigation or prosecution. 

Lillienfeld said no to the offer.

(According to our sources, Lillienfeld almost certainly declined the declination letter, because he and the sheriff preferred not to have a letter in their files, the purpose of which was to spell out in detail how and why the feds concluded that there was no criminal conduct.)

On November 16, 2021, Undersheriff Murakami upped the ante in the prosecutor search by sending a 306-page report (plus “documenting” materials), to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, asking the AG to take action on a group of five people that the LASD had been investigating.

The five “suspects,” as Murakami called them, included Teran, Teran’s assistant, LA County Inspector General Max Huntsman, an attorney working in Huntsman’s office—and LA Times reporter Maya Lau.

All five were identified as having “participated in numerous overt acts to unlawfully obtain and distribute confidential, protected personnel records.”

Attorney General Bonta and his team did not act on any of the sheriff’s suggested prosecutions. At least not while Villanueva was in office.

Later that would change.

Teran is finally charged

Although Alex Villanueva left the LASD in December 2022, having been defeated by Sheriff Robert Luna, there appeared to be others in and around the LA County law enforcement community who were reportedly still in favor of the idea of charging Teran specifically. Among them were reportedly some of the prosecutors who’d worked for former DA Jackie Lacey, who were not thrilled with the new liberal DA who had replaced her. They were also not at all fond of Gascon’s hires. Like Diana Teran.

In any case, something turned the tide and members of the Attorney General’s team suddenly elected to launch their own in-house investigation of the possible case against Teran.

And so it was that, on April 24, 2024, Teran found herself on the receiving end of an eleven count felony complaint and an arrest warrant
signed by CA DOJ Special Agent Tony Baca, alleging that after Teran left the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and began working for the L.A.County District Attorney’s office in 2021, she illegally used the confidential records of 11 sheriff’s deputies, when she flagged their names for inclusion in the DA’s Brady list.

The Warrant

It turns out, however, that there is a critical problem with the warrant itself, which we learned about when Susan E. Seager—a highly respected and nationally known UC Irvine law school professor—filed a motion to unseal the warrant on behalf of LA Public Press, reporter Emily Elena Dugdale, and LA Times reporter Keri Blakinger. Now all of us take a look at it, thanks to Seager, Blakinger, and Dugdale.

What the warrant shows, said Seager, was that “two of the 11 deputies placed their own disciplinary records squarely into the public domain in the form of California Court of Appeal decisions published in 2014 and 2015.”

Now all the details of all eleven of the deputies’ misconduct are in the public domain for any of us to see, if we check court records, which anyone can do.

So, as Teran’s case makes its way through the legal system, exactly what law did Diana Teran break?

Good question. It turns out that, it took a lot of creative digging to find a law that Teran had broken. But finally someone managed to locate an obscure California statute that the AG’s office thought would work.

They used it in “novel way,” is how Miriam Krinsky described the matter to us.

In other words, the AG’s investigators used the little known law in a way for which it was not intended.

(For those readers unfamiliar, Miriam Aroni Krinsky is the founder of Fair & Just Prosecution, a former federal prosecutor who served as the executive director of the Citizens Commission on Jail Violence, and a special adviser to then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell, among other positions.)

Sean Kennedy further explained the provenance of the statute used to charge Teran in the COC’s Amicus brief.

When this statute was passed into law, wrote Kennedy, it was intended to “…address computer hacking and theft of trade secrets.”

Using the anti-hacking statute to file on Teran wasn’t an easy fit, according to Kennedy, because building a Brady list was itself legal, (despite efforts to the contrary by the LASD deputies’ union, ALADS, as we mentioned earlier).

“Just as it was permissible for then-Sheriff McDonnell to use information about deputy misconduct to create an internal Brady list,” Kennedy wrote in the COC Amicus Brief, “it is likewise permissible for Teran to use the same information to enhance an internal District Attorney’s Bradydatabase to ensure that trial prosecutors comply with their Brady obligations.

Prosecutors, Amicus briefs & a conflict of interest

The COC was not the only law enforcement-related group that filed Amicus briefs regarding the case.

Krinsky and Fair and Just Prosecution, together with the Alliance of California Prosecutors, plus a list of eight former California DAs, also filed an Amicus Brief in which they described the charges against Teran as a “baseless case,” that Krinsky said has “chilled” police accountability.

“The charges brought against Ms. Teran are against the public interest and against the interest of justice,” said former Los Angeles DA Gil Garcetti. “This case is an insult to every prosecutor working hard to fulfill their constitutional obligations and to ensure police misconduct does not stay in the shadows.”

County Counsel & the COC continued

There’s more news ahead on this winding legal road, but now we need to travel back to the unusual campaign by lead County Counsel Harrison, to derail the LASD’s Civilian Oversight Commission’s decision to submit their own brief in support of Diana Teran.

After the County Counsel sent her trash-talking letter about Kennedy’s filing sent to the team of appellate judges, COC Chairperson Robert Bonner felt he had no choice but to write his own letter to the justices, which you can find here.

Here’s how it opens:

“….I can imagine how little this Court wants to hear further about the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission’s amicus application and the Los Angeles County Counsel’s attempt to muzzle the Commission to protect what it perceives to be its ‘turf.’

Around 1000 words later, Bonner’s letter closes as follows:

“As a former judge and trial practitioner, I have seldom seen legal positions as petty, trivial and facially frivolous as those taken by County Counsel in opposing the Commission’s amicus brief.  Respectfully Submitted…”

So what if anything can bring Los Angeles County closer to having effective and useful civilian oversight for its sheriff’s department?

“I think what’s important about this most recent battle between members of the Sheriff’s Oversight Commission and County Counsel, is that it brings to light a deeper problem,” said Krinsky, when we talked about the issue.

“This deeper problem,” she said, “is a conflict that flows from the fact that County Counsel purports to represent both the deputies and the oversight commission that is attempting to hold those deputies accountable,” said Krinsky.

“The commissioners don’t work for the county.  This is a commission that was birthed through a recognition of the need for enhanced oversight of  the sheriff’s department, which has a long history of troubled misconduct.”

Sean Kennedy put it another way. “I’ve been concerned for a long time now that, at the COC we’re engaging in oversight theater.

“We can’t see documents we’ve subpoenaed that we’re legally entitled to see, and our legal investigator, Inspector General, Max Huntsman can’t give us documents he has seen out of fear he might be prosecuted.”

Kennedy paused.

“I don’t think he would be charged,” Kennedy said. “But I would never have thought Diana Teran would face charges.”

Okay, so with all of the above in mind, now that Kennedy has left the Civilian Oversight commission, what is he going to do with the knowledge he’s gained, and the projects that he began at the COC that shouldn’t be dropped? And what is he going to do with the unique report titled “Fifty Years of ‘Deputy Gangs” that he and some of his Loyola Law School students at the Center for Juvenile Law & Policy published in January 2021?

“We’re going to update the report,” said Kennedy. “Another thing we’re going try to do is create a non-governmental Brady database and make it available to those who need it.”

So is he worried that he’ll be charged by the AG for creating a Brady list?

“No, I’m not worried. I won’t be doing anything wrong. I’ll just be doing what the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1963 should be done, but is not being done in Los Angeles County 60 years later.

“We won’t have the authority of the COC,” Kennedy said, “but I also won’t have County Counsel deliberately undermining the goal.”

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Post Script 1:

On April 2, 2025, Teran had a new hearing with the appellate court which featured some very interesting commentary from the appellate panel hearing the case. More on that in coming days.

So stay tuned.

Post Script 2:

Among the other individuals and organizations who filed Amicus Briefs pertaining to the Teran case, interestingly, one of the briefs came from the office of Nathan Hochman, LA County’s newest District Attorney who—rather than supporting the need for a Brady list—instead recommended that the court continue to pursue the prosecution of Diana Teran.