The steroid scandal involving several New York Police Department (NYPD) officers will likely adversely affect pending cases; prosecutors are leaning towards dismissing several cases in which defendants were busted by cops subsequently suspended for steroid use (”Runnin’ Scared: NYPD’s Busts Get Busted,” July 2).

Officer Vaughn Ettienne and Sergeant Raymond Cotton were suspended after testing positive for use of anabolic steroids believed to have been obtained from Lowen’s Pharmacy. The officers have been “poisoned” as witnesses in busts for which they were responsible.

Ettienne and Cotton would too easily become targets for the defense, says a source.In any event, cops will often become worthless as witnesses for the prosecution if they’re facing legal troubles of their own.

“My experience is that once cops get suspended, they generally don’t cooperate with us anymore” on their pending cases, the source says.

D.A. spokesman Jerry Schmetterer says the office will review other pending cases involving Ettienne, Cotton, and four other police officers suspended last November after testing positive for steroids, to determine whether those suspensions would adversely affect the cases stemming from the busts they made. Schmetterer says he doesn’t know how many such cases have been worked on by the six cops.

Defense attorneys would be allowed to ask arresting and supervising officers in the busts about their illegal steroid use and discuss alleged steroid side effects such as “roid rage” that led to “irrational aggressive behavior” and motivatons to “fabricate testimony and evidence.”

Lesher won’t comment on the case, but one of his motions notes that “anabolic steroids have been repeatedly cited by medical authorities as a reason for spontaneous and irrational aggressive behavior,” and contends that “‘roid rage was probably partially responsible for one of the most horrific instances of New York police brutality in modern memory, Justin Volpe’s sodomization of Abner Louima with a toilet plunger in 1997.”

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But try telling that to a Brooklyn jury—especially when the defense, according to its motions, was headed down this path: “In this case the reported illegal use [by Ettienne and Cotton] provides cause to believe that at least these officers put their interest above those of society, that these officers feel free to commit criminal acts with impunity and that these officers are under the influence of drugs which cause irrational aggressive behavior. Moreover, the desire to cover up such illegal behavior provides a motive to fabricate testimony and evidence.”

While the concern over “roid rage” is overblown, some astute political bloggers agree that the criminalization of anabolic steroids makes steroid-using cops vulnerable to “blackmail, corruption, and participation (at varying levels) in black market drug rings.”