By Edvard Pettersson

LOS ANGELES (CN) — An adviser to the former Los Angeles County district attorney won’t have to face charges for sharing purportedly confidential information about sheriff’s deputies involved in disciplinary proceedings, the California Courts of Appeals said on Thursday.

In a unanimous decision the three-judge appellate panel dismissed the charges brought by the state attorney general Rob Bonta, saying that Bonta had misused a statute that criminalizes hacking of or tampering with computers and data to charge Diana Teran for sharing publicly available court filings with her colleagues at the LA districts attorney’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,” Associate Justice Carl Moor wrote in the ruling.

“These 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 docket and files,” Moor added.

The appellate court took the unusual decision to hear Teran’s appeal before her case was tried. At an April hearing, the panel had already expressed their misgivings about the attorney general’s legal argument that they said turned a computer hacking statute into a non-disclosure statute that could open the door for hundreds of thousands California employees being held criminally liable.

Bonta last year accused Teran — an assistant district attorney for ethics and integrity under since voted-out District Attorney George Gascón — of repeatedly using data from confidential and protected peace officer files.

Teran had access to computer data including numerous confidential deputy files in 2018, while working at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as part of her job as constitutional policing adviser.

After she joined the Gascón’s office in January 2021, Bonta claims she impermissibly used that information to see if those deputies’ names should be included in a database prosecutors use to disclose, if needed, prior misconduct by law enforcement officers to defendants in criminal cases.

However, Teran has argued that the only information she shared at the district attorney’s office were publicly available decisions in civil cases that the deputies brought to challenge disciplinary actions against them.

Representatives of the attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.

The Prosecutors Alliance — a reform-oriented law enforcement association, that includes prosecutors and victim advocates —welcomed the appellate court’s decision.

“Today’s decision confirms what we’ve known from the very beginning: the case against Diana Teran was deeply flawed and legally baseless,” the alliance’s executive director, Cristine Soto DeBerry, said in a statement. “It was an attempt to criminalize a public servant simply for carrying out her ethical and constitutional responsibilities to disclose evidence of police misconduct.”