The United States Justice Department is now reviewing inmate abuse at Attica Correctional Facility, the upstate New York prison that employed three officers who pleaded guilty in March to state charges stemming from the beating of a 29-year-old inmate, according to the local district attorney and lawyers for the officers.

The federal inquiry was revealed in court filings by the former officers, who were allowed to avoid jail time in exchange for pleading guilty and agreeing to resign from their jobs at the prison. The three men, and a fourth guard who was not prosecuted, still face a multimillion-dollar civil suit filed by George Williams, the former inmate whose injuries from the Aug. 11, 2011, beating included a broken shoulder, cracked ribs and two broken legs, one of which required doctors treating him to insert a plate and six pins.

In a motion filed in Federal District Court in Buffalo, where the civil case is pending, a lawyer for Sean Warner, a former sergeant, asked a judge to delay depositions because of what the lawyer said was a Justice Department investigation into a “possible violation of inmate civil rights at Attica State Correctional Facility.” The lawyer, Cheryl Meyers Buth, said she had been told that “the criminal investigation arises from the same facts that are in dispute in this case,” and that the investigation was not “limited to the alleged assault on plaintiff George Williams.”

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, where Loretta E. Lynch, the former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was sworn in last month as attorney general vowing increased vigilance on civil rights, declined to comment. “The department can neither confirm nor deny whether there is an investigation into the Attica prison,” the spokeswoman, Dena Iverson, said.