May 30, 2012 11:53 AM

The unprecedented move last week by Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas J. Spota’s office to exonerate two men convicted as drug dealers and release them from prison, blaming the lack of “credibility” of an arresting Southampton Town Police officer in the department’s now-defunct Street Crime Unit, has significantly raised the stakes in a rapidly unfolding saga regarding the past operations of the department.

Although Police Chief William Wilson Jr. has called the releases “disheartening,” they appear to lend weight to some of his more recent actions.

In addition to vacating the convictions and dismissing the indictments of Mohammed H. Proctor, 36, of Riverside and Bernard T. Cooks, 31, of Southampton, the D.A.’s office said it is reviewing more than 100 arrests—both closed and pending cases—involving the officer in question, and anticipates the dismissal of more cases. Another court hearing in Suffolk County Criminal Court to examine the status of another arrest is expected to take place this week.

Mr. Proctor had filed a $50 million lawsuit against the town in 2010 challenging the circumstances of his arrest.

The D.A.’s office has not identified the officer in question, but several sources have confirmed that it is Officer Eric Sickles—one of two men named the department’s Officer of the Year in 2011—who reportedly developed a drug dependency while working undercover in the Street Crime Unit, which Chief Wilson disbanded last fall. A 12-year police veteran, he had worked in the unit for nine years.

The D.A’s office has offered no details on how Officer Sickles’s credibility was called into question. However, his direct supervisor in the Street Crime Unit, Lieutenant James Kiernan, then a sergeant, was suspended without pay earlier this month after Chief Wilson filed 32 disciplinary charges against him.

Those charges remain confidential, but Lt. Kiernan is accused of, among other things, giving tacit approval to Officer Sickles to continue to carry a sidearm, drive police cars, interact with the public and make arrests, despite having been aware that Officer Sickles had developed an addiction to prescription drugs. Lt. Kiernan also is accused of trying to cover up Officer Sickles’s dependency. In addition, at times, confiscated drugs in the Street Crime Unit office at police headquarters in Hampton Bays reportedly were left unsecured.

The Southampton Town Board is expected to discuss Lt. Kiernan’s charges at a meeting on June 12, pending a hearing. Officer Sickles has not been charged with wrongdoing and has not been suspended from duty.

The D.A.’s office recently “came into possession of information” affecting the credibility of the arrests, according to a statement released by the office on Friday.

“The decision to release convicted drug dealers back into the community under these circumstances is not undertaken lightly and is made free from political consideration or favor, contrary to recent assertions made by former town and police officials,” D.A. spokesman Robert Clifford wrote in the statement. “Rather, we are duty bound under the law to take this action,”

Days before the D.A.’s office asked for the release of the prisoners, it had, under subpoena, confiscated seven boxes of files from Southampton Town Hall. The files represented “every confidential personnel police investigation from the police department from the years 1990-2009,” according to an internal town memo that accompanied the subpoena.

Mr. Proctor was arrested, police said at the time, for selling cocaine and marijuana out of his home­ and using his underage son as a lookout. After obtaining a search warrant on his Riverleigh Avenue home in Riverside, police said they found more than 11 grams of crack cocaine, approximately 16 grams of marijuana, several Vicodin pills, a scale, packaging material, an electric stun gun and approximately $7,000 in cash. He was convicted and sentenced to two to four years in prison.

In the $50 million lawsuit Mr. Proctor filed in December 2010 from the Suffolk County Jail in Riverside, he claimed that the Street Crime Unit officers illegally searched his rectum for drugs, yanking a baggie of cocaine out of his anus, causing pain and injury, and then pressured him to sign a false statement saying the crack cocaine had been found in his pant leg, according to a copy of the suit. A felony complaint signed by Lt. Kiernan that accompanies the suit states that the cocaine was found in Mr. Proctor’s pant leg, but a police report, also signed by Lt. Kiernan the same day, April 21, states that the cocaine was secreted in Mr. Proctor’s rectum.