Key L.A. sheriff oversight official resigns, citing interference from county lawyers

A key member of a commission that oversees the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department resigned Monday after the county’s attorneys tried to thwart the nine-member body’s filing of a legal brief in the politically charged criminal case against a former advisor to then-D.A. George Gascón.

Sean Kennedy — who had been a member of the Civilian Oversight Commission since its inception — told The Times of his decision after the latest twist in the prosecution of Diana Teran, the Gascón official now facing six felony charges.

Last year, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta alleged that Teran had violated state hacking laws in 2021 when she sent public court records from lawsuits relating to alleged misconduct by sheriff’s deputies to a colleague as part of an effort to track problem cops.

State prosecutors argued that Teran only knew about the court records because she had access to confidential disciplinary files when she worked at the Sheriff’s Department three years earlier. They said she broke the law by later sharing them with a fellow prosecutor.

Teran pleaded not guilty last summer. In December, a California appeals court took up the matter, asking Bonta’s office to come to an April hearing and show why the justices should let the case continue instead of siding with the defense team’s request to end it.

Last week, the Civilian Oversight Commission held a special meeting to discuss weighing in on the case by submitting a legal filing known as an amicus brief, which would explain for the appeals court why commissioners say the case has impeded their work.

In recent months, the brief said, the Sheriff’s Department has been using the case “as an excuse” to withhold documents — including records about shootings, beatings, deputy gang activity and false statements by deputies.

“We have heard from the leadership of the department that they cannot give COC ad hoc committees confidential documents,” Kennedy said during Thursday’s special meeting. “They’re afraid that their employees will be prosecuted by the California attorney general just as Ms. Teran is being prosecuted.”

During the meeting, a lawyer for the county told the commission it did not have the authority to file a brief without getting permission from the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. But Robert Bonner, the former federal judge who chairs the commission, disputed that and said the oversight commission had done it once before without pushback.

After an animated discussion, the commission voted unanimously to authorize Kennedy to file the brief.

But Sunday, lawyers for the county fired back with a four-page letter saying that they, not Kennedy, are the commission’s official legal counsel. If he filed the brief, they said, it would be a “misrepresentation,” and they threatened to write a letter to the appeals court telling the justices he didn’t really have the “authority to represent the COC” in the filing.

“That said, we believe Commissioner Kennedy can accomplish the same worthy goals by filing the amicus brief in his individual capacity,” the letter said.

Apparently unfazed, a day later both Kennedy and Bonner filed the brief anyway.

Afterward, Kennedy resigned, he told The Times on Tuesday morning.

“It is not appropriate for the County Counsel to control the COC’s independent oversight decisions,” Kennedy said, “because the County Counsel represents sheriffs engaged in misconduct and because they helped hide deputy gang misconduct for decades.”

Bonner, who is not resigning, said he could not accept Kennedy’s letter of resignation because he did not appoint him to the commission and did not want him to resign.

“I need to talk Sean Kennedy out of it,” he told The Times on Tuesday, adding that County Counsel’s effort to block the filing of the brief was “not a hill to die on.”

The Office of County Counsel declined to comment. The California Department of Justice did not immediately offer comment. The district attorney’s office said it does not comment on pending litigation or personnel matters.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s Department indicated Tuesday afternoon that it is working to resolve the issue by asking Bonta’s office for a legal opinion on whether it is legal to share confidential deputy personnel records with ad hoc committees, which are not subject to the same open meetings requirements as the full oversight commission.

“At my direction, the LASD has produced hundreds of pages of non-confidential relevant information, but we have declined to produce the requested confidential peace officer records absent assurances it is lawful to do so,” Sheriff Robert Luna wrote in a two-page letter shared with The Times. “We have been advised, and independently understand, that the law simply is not clear.”

In a 17-page memorandum accompanying the letter, County Counsel added that there are some legal reasons to believe it would be permissible but that the law does not expressly allow it.

The allegations at the center of the case against Teran date back to early 2018, when she worked as a constitutional policing advisor for then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell. Her usual duties included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. When Alex Villanueva took office in December of that year, the Sheriff’s Department stopped employing Teran and soon began investigating her.

The inquiry started after Villanueva’s transition team reviewed personnel records to decide which ex-deputies to rehire and noticed “abnormalities,” leading to allegations that Teran had downloaded confidential personnel records of Villanueva and his top associates.

At some point the investigation expanded beyond its initial line of inquiry into Teran’s downloads and began probing other questions and several other suspects, including a former Times reporter.

As The Times reported last year, the department brought the findings of its investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI and the state attorney general’s office. Federal and state officials concluded no crimes had been committed in the case and told sheriff’s officials they wouldn’t take on the investigation.

Despite the initial lack of interest, in early 2022 Bonta’s office agreed to review the case. Two years later, state prosecutors formally declined to keep moving forward with it, as The Times previously reported.

Instead, they filed criminal charges based on the allegation that she’d accessed or learned of confidential personnel records while at the Sheriff’s Department, then illegally shared that information three years later when she worked for Gascón.

In April 2021, state prosecutors said, Teran sent court records related to roughly three dozen deputies to a subordinate to evaluate for possible inclusion in internal databases that prosecutors use to track officers accused of dishonesty and other misconduct. One is known as the Brady database — a reference to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brady vs. Maryland, which says prosecutors are constitutionally required to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.

Testimony during a preliminary hearing in August showed that in most cases Teran learned of the alleged misconduct when co-workers emailed her copies of court records from lawsuits filed by deputies hoping to overturn the department’s discipline against them.

“There’s a real irony there,” Kennedy said at Thursday’s meeting. “The department actually lobbies and orchestrates a very problematic prosecution of a district attorney” then “cites the prosecution it wanted” to deny the commission’s requests for information.

Inspector General Max Huntsman — the county watchdog who was for several years also a target of the same Sheriff’s Department investigation — called the case a “false prosecution” and urged the commission to “disregard the advice of County Counsel” and vote on filing the brief.

“The [U.S.] Supreme Court has already said that when a D.A. knows evidence that is exculpatory they have an absolute duty to provide it no matter how they learned of it,” he told the commission.

When Bonner weighed in, the usually straight-faced ex-jurist openly laughed at County Counsel’s suggestion that the oversight commissioners should ask the Board of Supervisors for permission to file a brief, and then have the county’s lawyers file it for them.

He said the “idea that the county could even move quickly enough to file” a brief for the commission before the Tuesday filing deadline set by the appeals court was “astonishing” considering how long the county has taken to handle other commission concerns.

The oversight commission’s brief is one of a series of filings raising concerns about the prosecution of Teran. In recent days, a group of law professors also filed a brief, as did the Los Angeles County Public Defender. Previously, the Prosecutors Alliance and the Fair and Just Prosecution Project weighed in on the case as well.

“It is unusual to have a unified chorus of prosecutors, defense attorneys, oversight officials and academics all expressing the same message that this prosecution is against the public interest,” James Spertus, one of Teran’s attorneys, told The Times this week. “Every brief writer has been unified in one message: The attorney general’s decision to prosecute this case threatens every facet of criminal justice administration.”

In response to Kennedy’s resignation, on Tuesday morning Huntsman likened the situation to the federal government.

“Sadly, Los Angeles is mirroring Washington in dismantling sources of independent analysis when it should be defending constitutional guarantees,” he told The Times. “The public will suffer for it.”