SAN JOSE — A Santa Clara County prosecutor under fire for reportedly using his 13-year-old daughter as bait to lure her suspected molester into performing incriminating acts on video has been put on paid leave as the District Attorney’s Office conducts an internal review of his actions that have left him vulnerable to potential criminal charges.

This news organization, which first reported about the prosecutor’s plan Sunday, has also confirmed that the case has been forwarded to the county’s Department of Family and Children Services for review. A county spokesperson issued a general statement in response to an inquiry about the referral.

“We have a duty to honor strict legal privacy protections afforded to child welfare related matters,” the statement reads. “However, the county takes any allegation involving child welfare extremely seriously, and any allegations of misconduct by county staff are immediately and thoroughly investigated.”

The state Attorney General’s office, which has taken over prosecution of the underlying molestation case to reduce conflicts of interest, is also evaluating the possibility of filing child endangerment charges against the prosecutor, multiple sources said.

Public Defender Molly O’Neal, whose office is representing the defendant, said the prosecutor’s conduct was something she has never seen in 30 years working in her office.

“I have never seen a prosecutor exercise such outlandish bad judgment,” O’Neal said. “If you work in the criminal-justice system, you know full well that people may act in ways that are unexpected. So you shouldn’t ever involve you or your family in a vigilante fashion when you are not trained to respond to any scenario that might unfold.”

She added: “The what-ifs in this situation are horrifying.”

The victim’s molestation was the subject of an active San Jose police investigation when the prosecutor brought his daughter back to the scene at the Los Alamitos Trail in Almaden Valley. After recording video of the man interacting with his daughter, the prosecutor gave the recording to the police. The next day, 76-year-old Ali Mohammad Lajmiri of San Jose was arrested and charged with four counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 and one count of false imprisonment.

The prosecutor has not been named in this story to protect the identity of the underage sexual assault victim. In a staff memo sent Monday announcing the internal review, District Attorney Jeff Rosen stressed the broader implications of the prosecutor’s actions on his office’s work.

“The choices we make in our professional and personal lives need to be in harmony with the protocols, laws and ethics of our criminal justice system,” Rosen wrote in the memo. “Swirling media attention, talk, opinions and gossip can lead people to forget that at the heart of this matter is a young victim.”

Much of that sentiment was echoed by Hana Callaghan, director of government ethics for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. She said that while the prosecutor was technically acting in the capacity of a private citizen, his stature as a prominent public servant and officer of the court binds him to a higher standard of conduct.

“Public officials, and prosecutors fall into that category, have a duty to put the public’s interest before his or her own personal interest,” Callaghan said. “One can argue the prosecutor acted against the public interest because the public has an interest in protecting children. He also harmed the public by putting the case in jeopardy, and the goal of getting justice done, in jeopardy.”

Legal experts, however, generally agree that the prosecutor’s actions do not constitute entrapment, because there is no evidence the suspect was coerced into committing any crimes. Even so, O’Neal said at minimum, defense attorneys can call into question the legitimacy of the investigation because the prosecutor interfered.

“We all have to stay in our own lanes,” she said. “The adversarial system doesn’t work if we don’t remember what role we play, and more importantly, what role we don’t play.”

The sexual assault investigation began Oct. 8, a day after the victim told her doctor she had been sexually assaulted. She gave accounts of three instances between August and October in which the same man approached her while she was walking her dog on the trail and touched her sexually. In the first week of November, the victim’s father and mother on separate occasions spotted the suspect on the trail and took photos of the man and followed him to his home.

On the afternoon of Nov. 11, the prosecutor and the victim had arranged for her to walk back and forth on the trail, while the two of them stayed in touch with cell phones and earbuds, according to the prosecutor’s account to police, as stated in a police report.

In the same report, the prosecutor stated that he and his daughter “had already done this several times,” and instructed his daughter to let the suspect touch her, but that “if it was the breast or between the legs to move away,” and break away “if she cannot handle things.”

The prosecutor provided police with video he recorded of the suspect putting his arm around the victim, allegedly pulling her back to a bench that they sat on, and then lean in to kiss her on the mouth, before she escaped his grasp and walked away. He then trailed closely as the suspect followed the victim, but reportedly told police that he lost sight of them on two occasions.

Lajmiri told investigators after his arrest that any contact with the girl’s breasts or buttocks was accidental and characterized the way he touched her as affectionate and “fatherly,” according to the police report. But he also claimed his memory was affected by Alzheimer’s disease. Lajmiri is being held in the Santa Clara County jail on $3 million bail and is scheduled to return to court Jan. 29.

Besides the ethical and legal problems posed by the prosecutor’s actions, O’Neal said that having the victim re-create the circumstances of her abuse risked harm far beyond the physical danger she faced.

“You cannot be level-headed or neutral if your children are involved,” she said, “and putting them in a vulnerable situation after they have already been allegedly traumatized is the height of poor judgment and lack of foresight.”

Update: November 19, 2019

This article has been updated to include a comment from Santa Clara County on a report that the case had been referred to the Department of Family and Children Services.