DA exits lawyer’s case to avoid conflict

The Bexar County District Attorney’s Office has filed a motion to voluntarily recuse itself from prosecuting San Antonio lawyer Martin Phipps’ misdemeanor harassment case, “to avoid any appearance of impropriety.”

Phipps, who is helping represent Bexar County in its ongoing lawsuit against opioid manufacturers and distributors, recently asked a judge to order District Attorney Joe D. Gonzales to recuse his office, alleging a conflict of interest because of the office’s own involvement in the litigation.

Phipps and his attorney, Michael McCrum, appeared via Zoom in a Friday hearing before Judge Carlo Key in County Court-at-Law No. 14.

“DA Gonzales has decided that out of an abundance of caution and to avoid any appearance of impropriety, the office will be voluntarily recusing from this case, and asks the court to appoint an attorney pro tem for this case,” Christian D. Neumann, an assistant district attorney, told the court.

The Class B misdemeanor charge accompanied an arrest Feb. 8 by San Antonio Police Department officers after an investigation that Phipps has accused a former law partner of instigating.

Phipps was freed on bail and the DA’s office still has not formally filed the charge. The case accuses him of harassing his former employee and exwife Brenda Vega, a legal assistant he wed in mid-December. Their marriage ended in annulment a month later.

Vega told police Phipps confronted her in “an aggressive and agitated state,” possibly under the influence of drugs, an arrest affidavit stated.

The document states that Vega feared for her life, left her personal belongings and flew to Mexico, but that Phipps kept trying to contact her at least 40 times, mostly through text messages.

McCrum has disputed the telephone harassment allegations, saying the messages amounted to “a husband venting on texts for two days with his wife, and (he) didn’t ever contact her again.”

Key granted the DA’s request to pull out of the case and said he would look for an attorney pro tem to prosecute it, setting a hearing in August.

Bexar County hired Phipps’ law firm in 2017 to sue opioid drug manufacturers and distributors that the county alleged were responsible for “causing and contributing” to local addiction problems. It and another firm filed the lawsuit in 2018.

McCrum wanted Gonzales to recuse the DA’s office from the criminal case because of entanglements between the DA’s office and Phipps’ current and former employees, including his former law partner, T.J. Mayes, a prominent San Antonio attorney.

Phipps and Mayes had a bitter falling out in January, a meltdown that played out on social media when Mayes quit after working on the lawsuit for a year.

Several other employees at Phipps’ law firm resigned prior to Phipps’ arrest.

Mayes is a former chief of staff to Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and to Mayor Ron Nirenberg when Nirenberg was a City Council member.

Gonzales