Kentucky police officials have charged a Louisville attorney with assault after he allegedly attacked a colleague with a Lysol can during a fight in the courthouse.
Lindsey Scott, 63, is charged with second-degree assault in the incident, according to WDRB in Louisville. He was booked into and released from the metro jail.
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office officials said another defense attorney, James “J.R.” Moore, was working on some of his cases around 8 a.m. Wednesday in an attorney workroom next to a district courtroom. At some point, Scott entered the room.
"Some sort of altercation developed," Lt. Col. Carl Yates, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office, told the news station.
Scott is accused of hitting Moore with the aerosol can, causing cuts to his head. When deputies got to the room, Moore was restraining Scott and both were covered with blood, Yates said.
The workroom had to be shut down and cleaned of the blood. Surveillance footage released to local news stations by the Sheriff's Office shows the bloody scene, as well as a handcuffed Scott sitting on a bench with blood covering his white suit.
Moore was sent to the hospital, where he told WAVE 3 News in Louisville he received about a dozen staples to his head.
Scott, who told deputies he was suffering chest pains, was taken to the hospital as well, but was later booked into the jail.
Moore later posted a message on Facebook about the skirmish.
"Today, I was totally blindsided while peacefully eating my breakfast," Moore wrote, according to WAVE 3 News. "First thing I felt was a thud. Just a scalp wound.
“My friends need not be concerned. All concerns should be for my perpetrator. Something is apparently very wrong in his life. He is a good man.”
Other attorneys also expressed shock over the incident, saying both Moore and Scott are well-known and well-liked.
Wednesday's incident is not the first time Scott has been behind bars. According to the Courier-Journal, the attorney was at the center of a sensational court case in the 1980s when, as a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, he was convicted of raping and attempting to kill a fellow Marine's wife at the Quantico military base in Virginia.
Scott, a Louisville native, was sentenced to 30 years in prison, but the verdict was later overturned on the grounds he received ineffective counsel from his civilian lawyer, the Courier-Journal reported.
The Washington Post in 1988 covered his second military trial, at the end of which he was exonerated by the military jury of charges of attempted murder, rape, sodomy and abduction.
Scott, who had spent four years in Fort Leavenworth, wept silently, the Post reported.
"In the tiny spectators' gallery, Scott's ailing mother, Mildred, began to shout in a gravelly voice, 'Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord Jesus! Thank the Lord for giving me back my innocent child!' before she was pulled from the courtroom by four or five supporters," the Post story read.
The Post reported there was one significant difference in evidence between the first and second trials: the recollection of a former security officer at a Zayre department store in Woodbridge, about 12 miles from Quantico, who testified she saw Scott shopping in the store at the time the victim was being attacked on the base.
Her testimony backed up Scott’s claim that he had spent the evening of the attack shopping for his pregnant wife’s birthday, which was the following day, the Post said.
The victim also had trouble identifying Scott in the days after the attack, saying each time that other men in the photos and lineup resembled him. The Post reported she said she picked Scott out of the lineup because, "He scares me the most."
No physical evidence linked Scott to the crime, the newspaper said. The case relied on circumstantial evidence, including the determination that the woman's throat was slashed with a serrated knife.
Scott had borrowed a serrated knife from his apartment manager that day and never returned it, the Post reported. He told investigators he inadvertently threw it away after using it to clean his stove.
Scott also lived in the same apartment complex as the 23-year-old woman and her husband and, because he was a military policeman training as a criminal investigator, would have had knowledge of police procedures regarding evidence gathering.
The woman's attacker knew her address, her husband's name and his job, as well as the "jargon" used by military police, the Post said. According to investigators, the assailant lured the woman from her home by calling and saying her husband had been in an accident, then offering to drive her to the hospital.
He instead took her to a wooded area and assaulted her, leaving her for dead, authorities said.
The victim picked Scott's car out of a lineup, telling authorities it was the one in which she had been sexually assaulted, the Post reported.
Scott's supporters argued that race was a factor in his conviction because he is black and his alleged victim was white.
"I maintained my innocence from the beginning," Scott told reporters after the not guilty verdict. "It was proven today by a jury of my peers that I was innocent. I'm innocent. I'm free."
Gary R. Myers, one of Scott's defense attorneys, told the Post after the verdict: "I think (jurors) just came to the conclusion that it was a tossup, and a tossup is not a guilty verdict."
Scott's case was the basis of a 1999 movie, "Dangerous Evidence: The Lori Jackson Story," which focused on the civil rights activist who fought to have the courts take a second look at Scott's conviction.
WAVE 3 News reported that those who know Scott said his experiences motivated him to go into law. The Courier-Journal reported that, at age 43 in 1999, he began law school at the University of Louisville.
According to the Kentucky Bar Association, Scott was admitted in October 2002. He is in good standing and has no record of public discipline.
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