A Cape and Islands prosecutor violated the rules when she met with a witness in a case without having his attorney present, a panel for the Boston Board of Bar Overseers (BBO) has ruled.

The three-member panel is recommending that assistant district attorney Laura Marshard be publicly reprimanded.

“[Ms. Marshard] crossed an ethical line, and for that we recommend she receive a public reprimand,” the panel wrote in a ruling issued late last week. “Other conduct on her part was problematic, but in the rough and tumble world of criminal prosecutions, it did not cross an ethical line into the charged misconduct.”

In the 54-page ruling issued Oct. 27, the panel found Ms. Marshard responsible for only one of three counts in the petition: the claim that she met with a defendant in a case without his attorney present.

The BBO is a 12-member board that takes action on complaints about misconduct by attorneys. It works under the state Supreme Judicial Court. The final outcome in the Marshard case is expected to be determined by the full board. Further review and revisions are possible, according to information on the BBO website about the process.

Ms. Marshard, a longtime assistant district attorney who lives in West Tisbury, has been under public scrutiny for more than a year for alleged misconduct in three separate criminal cases she handled in 2013 and 2014. A petition for discipline was filed with the BBO in September 2016. Formal investigations against prosecutors are considered rare.

A hearing before the three-member panel took place over eight days in May and June, and included testimony from 14 witnesses. The record in the proceeding includes hundreds of pages of transcripts and 76 exhibits.

All three cases at issue in the disciplinary proceeding were complicated, and the BBO report exhaustively recounts the details. One case stemmed from a bar fight in Oak Bluffs, another involved an alleged assault and another was sting operation in a drug case. Sloppy police work, the unsettling spectre of racial profiling, and a district court clerk-magistrate who may have held a grudge against Ms. Marshard are all touched on in the report.

“The parties over-litigated this case,” the report also concluded.

The bar counsel who handled the case recommended a three-month suspension, while attorneys for Ms. Marshard recommended the matter be dismissed.

The BBO report instead recommends a public reprimand. The report found that while a typical sanction would be a private reprimand, circumstances warranted more.

“The typical sanction is not enough,” the report said, calling the misconduct “willful and intentional, not accidental or peripheral . . . It was aggravated by the respondent’s lack of candor before us . . . as well as her substantial experience and failure to recognize the wrongfulness of her misconduct.”

In a statement, Cape and Islands district attorney Michael O’Keefe vowed an appeal and said he is reviewing the transcript in the case.

“I fully support my assistant district attorneys,” the statement said. “Every assistant district attorney in my office understands the higher ethical responsibilities we have in every criminal case.”