Haidl Again Asks D.A. Office to Step Aside

Lawyers for Gregory Haidl filed a motion Wednesday asking the Orange County district attorney’s office to recuse itself from his rape case, the day after the son of a former high-ranking sheriff was jailed because his bail was revoked.

It was the second time since Haidl and two friends were charged with raping an allegedly unconscious girl in 2002 that his lawyers had said county prosecutors shouldn’t handle the case because of a conflict of interest.

“Allowing this prosecutor to continue his harassing, malicious, selective and retaliatory conduct is not fair,” attorney Joseph G. Cavallo wrote in the motion filed in Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno’s Santa Ana courtroom.

Prosecutors said the motion lacked merit, just as Briseno had found in denying the prior one.

“We have done everything we can to treat Mr. Haidl like everyone else,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Kang Schroeder said. “It is clear that it is his defense team that wants special treatment and will lay blame to everyone else for what he has done.”

The motion cites a news conference prosecutors held after a new charge was filed against Haidl in August accusing him of unlawful sex with an underage girl. At that time Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas displayed an enlarged photo of Haidl and called him a threat to teenage girls.

The motion also cites prosecutors’ recent actions that put Haidl in jail Tuesday, when Briseno ruled that by being in an automobile accident while under the influence of beer and tranquilizers the teen had violated a court order requiring him not to drink alcohol or break any laws.

In February, when Haidl’s lawyers filed a motion similar to Wednesday’s, they said Rackauckas was prosecuting the case overzealously to prove his impartiality; Haidl’s father, then-Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl, was one of Rackauckas’ campaign donors.

In denying the motion, Briseno wrote that after viewing a tape the defendants made of the alleged rape at the elder Haidl’s Corona del Mar home, “any rational, responsible law-enforcement personnel” would have handled the case the same way.