As he prepares to take office Jan. 1, Bexar County District Attorney-elect Nico LaHood has been busy deciding whom to keep among the prosecutors employed by outgoing District Attorney Susan Reed.

At the same time, he has continued to work as a defense attorney. This month, LaHood insisted on personally defending a client, and shortly before going to trial, he sought to retain the prosecutors in the case, a scenario rife with potential conflicts of interest.

A mistrial was declared last week when a witness violated a judge’s ruling.

LaHood had placed himself in a powerful position by placing the prosecutors, Alaina Altis and Bridgett Clay, in an uncomfortable one: The defense attorney controlled their jobs. In agreeing before trial to retain them, LaHood turned his adversaries into future employees.

“I was doing my job,” Altis told me. “I’m supposed to prosecute cases that warrant that. This is a case that ended up in serious bodily injury to the victim. And so, because the court called the case to trial on (Dec.) 15th, it was my ethical obligation to proceed with the case if we found merit in it, which we did.”

When I called LaHood on Monday, he sounded irked by any scrutiny of the case.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, “you’re going into waters that you don’t understand.”

LaHood had calmed down about an hour later, when he invited me to talk at the courthouse. He’d just finished interviewing prosecutors for his new team and had chosen to retain the “vast majority” of them, he said, rejecting only 22.

In the recent case, LaHood was guided by ethics, he said.

His client, Omid Jamali, is accused of assaulting a man in March 2012 at the Grotto nightclub, striking Joshua Hernandez in the face hard enough to send him to the hospital. Jamali was charged with aggravated assault with serious bodily injury.

The district attorney’s office contacted the State Bar of Texas about the case, and “they said that you have an ethical obligation to represent your clients,” LaHood told me, “so if the case is up for trial, there’s nothing inappropriate about doing it.”

LaHood had insisted on trying the case, District Judge Ron Rangel said.

“Judge Rangel knows the state bar rules,” LaHood told me. “That’s all. I don’t need his permission.”

LaHood referred me to the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, highlighting a section requiring him as district attorney to recuse himself from any cases involving clients he represented as a defense lawyer.

“These are the only rules we have to go by,” he said.

In seeking before trial to retain the prosecutors, LaHood was being “kind” and “thoughtful,” he said.

“I just thought that was the right thing to do,” he told me. “Can you imagine them trying to try the case? Are they going to be hesitant to do their best work if they’re thinking, 'This guy could be my boss,’ and, 'What if I do something that ticks him off and then I get fired for it?’”

“I wanted them to know, 'Guys, do your best work. You have your job,’” LaHood added. “'You come at me as hard as you can. Try to beat your boss. How about that?’”

bchasnoff@express-news.net