Judge charged with stealing cocaine from evidence in his OWN cases

Paul Pozonsky allegedly asked police officer to bring 200 grams to chambers

Packets were later found filled with baking soda and containing his DNA

Washington County judge also had access to marijuana and other drugs

Former Washington County Judge Paul Pozonsky outside Washington County Court yesterday

A judge has been charged with stealing cocaine from evidence in cases he presided over in the US.

Paul Pozonsky, 57, allegedly kept the confiscated drugs after asking police to bring them into the courtroom to be entered as evidence.

In May 2012, state police investigators looked at the evidence envelopes and discovered cocaine was missing or had been tampered with.

Some of the packets had been filled with baking soda and contained the Washington County judge's DNA.

Mr Pozonsky - who established a drug treatment court designed to help people avoid jail for drug offences - resigned last year.

He is facing a list of charges including theft, possession and misappropriation of entrusted property and was arraigned yesterday.

His lawyer Bob Del Greco said: 'This is troubling. This is humbling as you might expect. And it’s a serious matter and he’s taking it as such.'

On one occasion Mr Pozonsky allegedly called a police officer handling a case and asked him to bring a haul that totalled more than 200 grams of cocaine to his chambers.

Police officers testified that Mr Pozonsky often held onto drug evidence after he requested it for pretrial hearings, suggesting he would have amassed hundreds of grams of cocaine in addition to marijuana and tablets of Suboxone, a narcotic used to treat opioid addiction, in a filing cabinet in his chambers on the first floor of the Washington County Courthouse.

On one occasion, he requested all evidence for a particular case but then returned items that were not drugs - including cash and a sword.

The story attracted a flurry of comments on Facebook, including one by Michele Pozonsky who said: 'I married into the Pozonsky family 18 years ago, Paul's parents are the best people on the planet and he was raised in a good Christian family.



'I am not making excuses for him, if he did what they say, then I hope he does the time. But please don't judge the rest of us by him, every family has one ours just happens to be in the public eye.'



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