It was an odd mix of feelings around the tables at Char Bar last night, as the prosecutors who had just been given their pink slips from incoming DA Pat Lykos gathered to meet with sympathizers.No one wants to lose a job in this economy, of course; on the other hand, some had been vocal supporters of Lykos's opponents and, as one attendee told Hair Balls, "they know elections have consequences."Not in the Harris County DAs office, though, for at least 40-odd years. The DAs office has been the ho
Murray Newman has been anonymously writing an entertaining blog about being a prosecutor in Harris County; now that he's been canned (he supported incoming DA Pat Lykos' primary opponent), it's clear that a) the blogging will continue, and b) it will still be entertaining.Witness his latest scoop: Lykos has ruled that pants suits are fine for female prosecutors, but "She is concerned with some of the short skirts she's seen."Now that's something you'd never hear Chuck Rosenthal say.-- Richard Co
Photo courtesy Pat Lykos for DAIf you look up "throwing someone under the bus" in the dictionary of clichés, you might just find the following example from Pat Lykos's braver, newer Harris County District Attorneys Office used as illustration. Not content to keep her ire in-house about a recent jury selection gone awry, Lykos lambasted two of her prosecutors in the pages of the Chronicle. During the jury selection of the murder trial of Ricky Whitfield last Tuesday, prosecutors Mark Donnelly an
Alan Bernstein, the longtime political reporter for the Houston Chronicle, is quitting the paper to join the staff of Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia.Bernstein ends his 29 years at the Chron Friday and starts with Garcia at the end of the month."I got an unsolicited job offer and I investigated it," he tells Hair Balls. "I enjoy the job I have today, but when I checked it out it seemed there could be a lot of headway to be made serving the public in this way."He'll be "Director of Public Aff
