A veteran Los Angeles County prosecutor is suing the state of California, alleging her home address, birthdate and other private information was temporarily made public last June on an Attorney General’s Office website listing holders of persons authorized to carry concealed weapons.
Deputy District Attorney Michele Hanisee’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges privacy violations and intentional infliction of emotional distress. She seeks unspecified compensatory damages as well as punitive damages where allowed by law.
A representative for the Attorney General’s Office did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the suit brought Friday.
In her 23-year career as a crime fighter, Hanisee has prosecuted dozens of murderers, countless members of violent street gangs and criminal syndicates and other felons with no regard for human life or civil society, the suit states.
Hanisee has a permit to carry a concealed firearm to protect herself, as do many judges, law enforcement officers, correctional officers and other crime fighters, the suit states. The privacy she expects in order to protect herself from intimidation, retribution and violence by the very people she prosecutes or by their criminal associate was undermined in last summer when Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office published a web portal that for about 12 hours over the course of June 27 and 28 made the home addresses and birthdates of Hanisee and other permit holders available to the public, the suit states.
“As a result of a political stunt by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, plaintiff’s and thousands of other crime fighters’ personally identifying information … was publicly released … ” the suit states.
The Attorney General’s Office falsely tried to portray the inappropriate release of the information as a “breach,” the suit states.
“Despite the Orwellian attempt to characterize the Department of Justice’s intentional publication of the information as a `breach,’ it was patent that the Department of Justice twice intentionally took the web portal live and published the information,” the suit states. “Thus, far from being a hack or breach of the Department of Justice’s servers as they attempted to characterize it, the publication of the permit holders’ personal information, and the fuctionality allowing members of the public to download or access that information, was a deliberate act by the Department of Justice.”
An outside law firm hired to conduct an investigation into the alleged breach found that it was done intentionally by unnamed department employees or contractors, but no steps were outlined as to how Hanisee and others affected would be protected in the future, the suit states.
“Notwithstanding the political motivations behind the Attorney General’s publication of the web portal, (Hanisee) did expect that once he understood that his decision to publish the portal had endangered the safety of thousands of public servants like her, Bonta would take swift action to protect them,” the suit states. “He shockingly has not.”