How do people handle cases, especially assault-FV, where there are charges filed against both participants in the same incident or over a series of incidents? Or when there are multiple, unrelated cases with victims/state's witness that are defendants in other cases? Are these conflicts of interest that require recusal/disqualification of the prosecutor for at least one party consistently across cases? I checked the new TDCAA Conflicts, but it did not cover this scenario. Thanks in advance.

I had a similar situation in one county where one party filed a protective order. What complicated things in that case was that I learned information that was protected by attorney-client privilege that (1) would tend to incriminate that client in the criminal case pending against them (clearly a conflict); and (2) could be considered Brady material in the criminal case pending against the party (against whom we filed the protective order). We got special prosecutors from other counties on the criminal cases because of that. I'm not necessarily sure you have to do that in every case in which defendants become victim/witnesses and vice-versa, since there is not an attorney-client relationship. If a criminal becomes a victim, they have a right to be protected by the law just as much as their own victims did.

This also happens all the time in cases where someone turns State's witness. Defense attorneys want to (and are entitled) know about whether the State has cut any type of deal with the offender-witness that requires them to testify favorably to the State.