The allegations at the center of the case date to at least 2018, when Teran worked at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department as a constitutional police advisor. Part of her usual duties there included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations. The department's secret tracking software logged all of her searches and kept records of the more than 1,600 personnel files she searched for and reviewed, according to the affidavit unsealed last week.

Teran served as assistant district attorney over ethics and integrity operations. A spokesperson for the district attorney's office previously said in a statement that Teran was no longer in that role, with no further clarification offered.

After she joined the office in 2021, the affidavit says, Teran sent a list of 33 names and supporting documents to another prosecutor for possible inclusion in a so-called Brady database, which contains officers with problematic disciplinary histories. The name is a reference to a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.

The affidavit says that several of the names Teran emailed to fellow prosecutor Pamela Revel were deputies whose files she'd accessed while working at the Sheriff's Department, and that she "would not have identified so many of these deputy sheriffs" otherwise.

The 11 felony charges reflected the 11 of those 33 deputies whose names the affidavit said did "not appear in either public records request responses or media articles."

But, as first reported by the Los Angeles Public Press, the two names left unredacted last week in the public version of the affidavit were those of deputies whose disciplinary records were already openly accessible through other means. After they appealed their firings for dishonesty in the early 2010s, their disciplinary histories were discussed in detail in publicly available court decisions a few years later.

After finally learning the remaining nine names on Thursday, Spertus argued in this week's filing that all of the deputies had similarly accessible records.

"The Attorney General's entire theory of guilt is dependent on the allegation that Ms. Teran attached non-public documents to her April 26, 2021, email, yet the affiant apparently never looked in the Los Angeles Superior Court files for the documents it alleges now were non-public," Spertus wrote. "Each of the 11 documents underlying the 11 counts in the Complaint is a document that is public and located in Los Angeles Superior Court case files."

The Sheriff's Department doesn't "own" public court records, he argued, just because they are kept in Sheriff's Department files.

"Ms. Teran would not need permission from the LASD to use a public record contained in the LASD databases, and she can use those public records for any purpose," Spertus wrote. "Simply stated, the 'use' of public information cannot be a crime."

In his 40-page filing, Spertus also raised concerns about whether the case — stemming from material accessed in 2018 — had already exceeded the three-year statute of limitations for the charges.

Teran is expected to return to court on July 17, though her lawyer voiced frustration at the delay.

"It's been a struggle to figure out what this case is about from the moment it was filed," he said, "and as soon as I can get this heard I expect it'll be dismissed."

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