Police1 Staff Report
(NEW YORK ) - A, NYPD officer who had been charged with engaging in sexual activity with two female prisoners has pleaded guilty to official misconduct but had the more serious charges dropped.
Officer Thomas Ippolito, who was dismissed from the Police Department after 18 years, denied that he had any sexual contact with the women in 1999, the Daily News reported.
Ippolito was one of three officers originally charged in a sex scandal at Brooklyn Central Booking.
Police Officer Plutarco Jiminez was acquitted of engaging in a sex act with a 17-year-old girl with a record of prostitution. Officer James Robitsek was found guilty of official misconduct for offering to speed a teen’s prostitution case in exchange for a date, the newspaper reported.
Ippolito’s official misconduct guilty plea on Monday stemmed from him witnessing another officer taking a female from the cell area and not reporting it to his superiors, his attorney, James DiPietro, told the newspaper.
Prosecutors had originally charged that Ippolito and Jiminez had consensual sex with the a teenage prisoner in May 1999, but broke the law because prisoners cannot give consent to their captors, the Daily News reported.
District Attorney Charles Hynes’ office decided to drop the sex charges against Ippolito after a special prosecutor found that a prosecutor did not tell defense lawyers that one of the women did not identify Ippolito in two out of three photo lineups, DiPietro told the Daily News.