LA District Attorney ethics aide collecting $320K salary despite felony charges

(The Center Square) - Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon’s senior ethics aide has received at least two months of her $320,000 salary since felony charges were filed against her by the California Attorney General for allegedly improperly using confidential records when creating a list of disreputable police officers to ban from use as witnesses.

If the LADA’s office is paying for her criminal defense — which is yet unknown as the office has not responded to a public records request on the matter — taxpayers could be paying for both prosecution and defense in this case. However, with the dropping of three of the charges before the start of hearings, and a judge's dismissal of another two charges, there's a chance the prosecutor in question may not be found guilty of anything at all.

According to documents obtained via a public records request by former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Kathleen Cady, Los Angeles Ethics and Integrity Assistant District Attorney Diana Teran was still being paid her $320,000 salary as of the end of June, says the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys.

With charges first filed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta in April, this means Teran has been paid for at least two months after charges were filed. Government employees under investigation are often put on administrative paid leave while the investigation is underway. Because charges are only filed after an investigation has yielded results, government employees often have their pay suspended or are fired at this juncture, making it unusual that Teran is still being paid.

Bonta originally filed eleven felony charges against Teran for accessing confidential law enforcement files for flagging officers for inclusion in the so-called Brady List of disreputable police officers prosecutors will try not use as witnesses. This list is considered a career dead end for officers included in the list.

Teran is accused of having used data accessed while at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for consideration in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, adding individuals who were not yet found guilty of misconduct but were still challenging such allegations. Prosecutors allege Teran only could have known about these ongoing proceedings via confidential data, while Teran’s defense says all of this information was available via publicly accessible court records.

A judge overseeing the case has dismissed five of the charges against Teran, noting that while Teran may have used public court records to identify individuals for Brady List flagging, Teran could have used the LASD system to do further research.

A state investigator found Teran added 11 names not mentioned publicly to her Brady list, resulting in the 11 felony charges. Three of those were dropped by the state before the trial started; two of the 11 officers had been fired for dishonesty, and the third was a civilian employee of unknown status.

The judge overseeing the case threw out two of the eight remaining charges due to a lack of evidence that she had been tracking those individuals’ cases.

Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose son Eric Garcetti recently served as mayor of the City of Los Angeles and is now ambassador to India, told the Los Angeles Times he can’t see the issue with Teran’s actions.

“It’s a sad day when someone as fine a lawyer and as ethical and careful as she is was working within the scope of her authority and somehow that scope becomes criminalized,” Garcetti told the Times.