Lawyer says DA investigator slammed his head into courthouse bench during brawl

SANTA ANA, Calif. — An Orange County defense attorney has suffered a bloodied face after a brawl with a district attorney’s investigator in a courthouse hallway.

Lawyer James Crawford said he was treated at an emergency room for a fracture beneath his eye, the Orange County Register reported Friday.

Crawford was speaking with a witness in the courthouse Wednesday morning when an investigator he did not know interrupted his conversation and called defense lawyers sleazy, said Jerry Steering, Crawford’s lawyer.

The men began arguing and the investigator slammed Crawford’s head into a bench and began punching him, Steering said.

The district attorney’s office declined comment.

The state attorney general’s office will review the incident, which has stoked outrage among many defense attorneys.

“If anyone else would have done that to Mr. Crawford, they would be arrested,” Kate Corrigan, a defense lawyer in Orange County, told the newspaper. “They aren’t ever willing to acknowledge there is a problem. It is deny, deny, deny. People can’t even act like adults in a courthouse.”

The fight comes amid a simmering scandal in the county over the district attorney’s use of jailhouse informants and handling of related evidence.

Crawford recently won a new trial for a double murder suspect over the allegations.

The Justice Department is reviewing requests for a federal investigation into the county’s justice system, said Dena Iverson, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.

The Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, which represents district attorney’s investigators, said there were many witnesses to the courthouse fight and Crawford’s account is inaccurate.

“His one-sided version of events is simply not true,” said Tom Dominguez, the association’s president.