The Sheriff’s Sheriff Sheriff surveillance official resigns, citing the county interference

A key member of a commission that oversees the Sheriff’s Department of Los Angeles resigned on Monday after the county lawyers tried to thwart the file of nine members of a legal file in the politically charged criminal case against a Former advisor to the then, then-Da George Gascón.

Sean Kennedy – who was a member of the Civil Supervisory Committee since its creation – told Times for its decision after the last touch of the pursuit of Diana Teran, the head of Gascón faced with six crime charges.

Last year, California Atty. General Rob Bonta alleged that Teran had violated the laws on the hacking of the State in 2021 when she sent public judicial files of the proceedings relating to a fault presumed by the deputies of the sheriff to a colleague within the framework of An effort to follow the problematic cops.

State prosecutors argued that Teran only knew the judicial archives because she had access to confidential disciplinary files when she worked in the sheriff’s department three years earlier. They said that she had broken the law by sharing them later with another prosecutor.

Teran pleaded not guilty last summer. In December, A California court of appeal took over the No matter, asking the Bonta office to come to an hearing in April and show why the judges should let the case continue instead of rallying at the request of the defense team to end it.

Last week, the civil surveillance commission held a special meeting to discuss the weighing on the case by subjecting a legal file known as Amicus memory, which would explain the Court of Appeal why the commissioners say that the case hampered their work.

In recent months, The memory said, The Sheriff Department used the “Excuse” case to retain documents – including shooting, blows, assistant gang activity and false declarations by deputies.

“We heard the management of the department say that they could not give the committees of the COCs of confidential documents,” said Kennedy at the special meeting on Thursday. “They are afraid that their employees will be prosecuted by the Attorney General of California, just as Ms. Teran is prosecuted.”

During the meeting, a county lawyer told the commission that he did not have the power to file a dissertation without obtaining permission from the Comté de la. But Robert Bonner, the former federal judge who chairs the commission, challenged him and declared that the supervisory committee had done it once before without perspective.

After a lively discussion, the Commission voted unanimously to authorize Kennedy to deposit the thesis.

But Sunday, Comté lawyers retaliated With a four -page letter saying that they, not Kennedy, are the official legal advisor of the Commission. If he filed the memory, they said, it would be a “false statement”, and they threatened to write a letter to the court of appeal telling the judges that he did not really have “the authority to represent the coc ”in the file.

“That said, we believe that Commissioner Kennedy can achieve the same worthy objectives by placing the memory of AMICUS on an individual basis,” said the letter.

Apparently imperturbable, a day later, Kennedy and Bonner still deposited the memory.

Subsequently, Kennedy resigned, he told Times on Tuesday morning.

“It is not appropriate for the county council to control the surveillance decisions independent of the COC,” said Kennedy, “because the county council represents the sheriffs engaged in a fault and because they helped hide An assistant gang fault for decades. ”

Bonner, who does not resign, said that he could not accept Kennedy’s resignation letter because he had not appointed him to the committee and did not want him to resign.

“I need to talk about it in Sean Kennedy,” he told Times on Tuesday, adding that the efforts of the county’s lawyer to block the memory was “not a hill on which to die”.

The Comté lawyer’s office refused to comment. The California Ministry of Justice did not immediately comment. The District Prosecutor’s Office said that it does not comment on current disputes or personnel issues.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff department indicated Tuesday afternoon that it was trying to solve the problem by asking the Bonta office for a legal opinion on the possibility of sharing the confidential files of assistant personnel with ad hoc committees , which are not subject to the same open -open meeting requirements such as the complete supervisory committee.

“In my direction, the LASD produced hundreds of non -confidential relevant pages of information, but we refused to produce confidential peace files in the absence of the peace officer. Letter shared over time.” We have been informed and independently understand that the law is simply not clear. ”

In a 17 -page memorandum accompanying the letter, the county’s lawyer added that there are legal reasons to believe that it would be allowed, but that the law did not expressly allow it.

The allegations at the center of the case against Teran date back to the beginning of 2018, when she worked as a constitutional police advisor for the sheriff of the time, Jim McDonnell. His usual tasks included access to confidential deputy files and internal affairs surveys. When Alex Villanueva took office in December of the same year, the Sheriff department stopped using Teran and soon began to investigate her.

The investigation began after the Villanueva transition team examined the personnel files to decide what ex-dependeuments to rehire and noticed “anomalies”, leading to allegations that Teran had downloaded confidential registers of staff Villanueva and its best partners.

At one point, the investigation extended beyond its initial line of investigation into the downloads of Teran and began to probe other questions and several other suspects, including a former Times journalist.

As the Times reported it last year, The ministry brought the conclusions of its investigation to the Office of the American Prosecutor, the FBI and the Office of the Attorney General of the State. Federal and state officials concluded no crime had been committed In the case and told the sheriff managers that they would not accept the investigation.

Despite the initial lack of interest, at the beginning of 2022, the Bonta office agreed to review the case. Two years later, state prosecutors officially refused to continue to move forward with him, as the Times previously reports.

Instead, they filed criminal accusations according to the allegation that she had accessed or learned about the confidential personnel files during her stay in the Sheriff department, then shared this information three years later when She worked for Gascón.

In April 2021, state prosecutors said, Teran sent judicial files linked to approximately three dozen deputies to a subordinate to assess the possible inclusion in the internal databases that prosecutors use to follow the accused agents of dishonesty and other misconduct. One is known as the Brady database – a reference to the decision of the United States Supreme Court of 1963, Brady against Maryland, who affirms that prosecutors are constitutionally required to submit any favorable proof to a defendant , including evidence of police misconduct.

The testimony during a preliminary hearing in August showed that, in most cases, Teran learned allegedly misconduct when colleagues sent by e-mail his copies of the judicial archives of prosecution filed by deputies hoping to cancel the discipline of the ministry against them.

“There is real irony there,” said Kennedy at Thursday’s meeting. “The Department puts pressure and orchestrates a very problematic prosecution of a district prosecutor”, then “quotes the prosecution it wanted” to refuse requests for information from the Commission.

Inspector General Max Huntsman – The County Key of County was for several years also a target of the same survey of the Sheriff department – qualified the case as “false lawsuits” and urged the committee to “ignore the councils of the county’s advice” and to vote on the filing of the thesis.

“The (Supreme Court of the United States) has already declared that when a DA is experiencing evidence that is at the excuse, they have the absolute duty to provide it, no matter how they learned,” -It declared to the Commission.

When Bonner weighed, the former ex-adjustable generally right laughs openly from the suggestion of the county council according to which the supervisory commissioners should ask the supervisory commission to file a thesis, then ask the lawyers of the county to deposit it to them.

He declared that “the idea that the county could even move fairly quickly to deposit” a thesis for the commission before the deadline of Tuesday fixed by the court of appeal was “astonishing” given the duration of the county for Respond to other committee problems.

The thesis of the supervisory committee is part of a series of documents raising concerns concerning the continuation of Teran. In recent days, A group of law teachers also filed a brief, as is the public defender of the County of Los Angeles. Previously, the alliance of prosecutors and the Fair and Just Prosecution project also weighed on the case.

“It is unusual to have a unified choir of prosecutors, defense lawyers, surveillance officials and academics expressing all the same message as this pursuit is contrary to the public interest,” said James Spertus this week , one of Teran’s lawyers. “Each brief writer has been unified in a message: the prosecutor general’s decision to continue this case threatens each facet of the administration of criminal justice.”

In response to Kennedy’s resignation, Tuesday morning hunter compared the situation to the federal government.

“Unfortunately, Los Angeles reflects Washington to dismantle independent sources of analysis when she should defend constitutional guarantees,” he told Times. “The public will suffer.”