Prosecutors are moving to dismiss at least 1,169 drug cases undermined by a State Police lab scandal because the evidence was destroyed before it could be retested.

The disclosure comes as a special judge appointed to deal with the legal fallout of accusations against a drug lab chemist has ordered the Attorney General's Office to finish retesting thousands of affected cases. Judge Edward Jerejian was appointed in April 2016 to oversee the case, which began when a technician at the state Office of Forensic Sciences laboratory in Little Falls was accused of falsifying records in a single drug case.

The technician, Kamalkant Shah, was allegedly caught in December 2015 "dry-labbing" evidence in the marijuana case -- essentially recording a positive identification without properly analyzing the sample. Shah was the subject of a criminal investigation but ultimately was not criminally charged.

That left local, county and state authorities open to challenges to the convictions of any case Shah touched during his time at the lab.

More than two years later, Jerejian on Wednesday issued an order laying out a three-step process for vetting the cases, which could total anywhere from 7,827 to 14,800.

The order states that the New Jersey Attorney General's Office has already retested 1,326 samples from cases Shah handled, all of them "affirming the original positive test results" for drugs.

So far, the state has received 485 motions to toss drug charges as a result of the scandal, more than 400 of which have been "resolved." A spokesman for the Attorney General's Office said just four of those cases were thrown out by the judge.

But another 1,169 cases have been identified in which the drug evidence was destroyed, meaning authorities cannot retest the samples to confirm they contained drugs.

In a statement, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said his office was "committed to ensuring that no conviction is upheld unless we are satisfied that any drug testing conducted was in fact reliable."

The judge ordered the office to develop a plan for dealing with defendants in cases involving destroyed evidence.

"Those cases will be dismissed," a spokesman for Grewal, Peter Aseltine, told NJ Advance Media. "We are working with Judge Jerejian, the Public Defender and the Administrative Office of the Courts to establish a process to dismiss those cases."

According to the judge's order, the remaining cases in which evidence is still available will be subjected to a more rigorous form of drug testing than was in place at the time of the scandal. First Assistant Public Defender Kevin Walker said the move toward newer methods had been a positive result of the scandal.

"Hopefully with its adoption, we will avoid future allegations of laboratory fraud," he said.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.