NEW YORK — A public defender lawyer arrested on Rikers Island and turned into the poster child for drug smuggling is suing the correction officers union and its president — after the supposedly pot-laced papers he brought into the jail turned out to be drug free.

Correction officers and their union head, Benny Boscio, made a public show of arresting Bernardo Caceres, 31, last June — calling him a “drug peddling attorney” and giving the guards who arrested him the hero treatment in a press release still available on the union web site as of Thursday morning.

Caceres, who worked for the Queens Defenders, was carrying legal documents to share with his client, Luis DeJesus, who was getting ready for a robbery trial, when he visited Rikers on June 11, 2025, he said in a federal false arrest and defamation lawsuit filed Wednesday.

He handed those papers over to be screened and got them back to review in an interview room at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island with DeJesus, whose trial was due to start the next morning.

He left the papers with his client as he and his co-counsel left the room. But when they exited, they were greeted by a correction officer who told them they weren’t free to leave, along with even more correction officers, some carrying long guns, and a man in a business suit, the lawsuit alleges.

They ushered him into a small closet-like room, he said, and an officer eventually told him, “They’re looking over your stuff, but it’s not looking good,” Caceres, of Park Slope, told the Daily News.

“I’m just dumbfounded,” Caceres said. “I know I’m 100% certain of my innocence — and this is ridiculous.”

A correction officer dog detected something on the papers and that a field test showed to be traces of THC, the main ingredient in marijuana, Caceres was told.

The correction officers arrested him, walking him through a cheering and jeering crowd of their colleagues, and finally released him hours later with a desk appearance ticket charging him with promoting contraband, the lawsuit says.

“Other COs (correction officers) are coming in. They’re literally giving each other high fives, literally saying, ‘We got one,’ applauding,” he recounted.

One of them stopped to snap his photo, which became part of the press release, the lawsuit alleges.

“Mr. Caceres attempted to cover his face, at which point he was again taunted by the crowd of corrections officers,” the lawsuit reads.

The press release by the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association stated that authorities “ultimately found over 130 pages that had tested positive for THC.”

But the papers didn’t contain any traces of drugs at all and the field tests the correction department uses are notoriously inaccurate, returning a false positive roughly four out of five times, according to the lawsuit, which cites a November 2024 city Department of Investigation report.

The Bronx D.A.’s office dropped the charges less than three weeks later.

“They knew that those tests were giving false positives,” Caceres said of the correction officers who arrested him. “They were advised by their own people internally to not use that as the reason to make an arrest. Yet they went ahead and did it and then they doubled and tripled down.”

The DOI report cited by Caceres’ suit recommended that, because the field tests were so unreliable, the Department of Correction “should not make arrests of any person, staff, visitors, or (persons in custody) on the basis of field tests in the absence of other evidence corroborating the presence of narcotics.”

Boscio at the time used the arrest to press the argument that the jail should move toward paperless mail to prevent contraband.

“The fact that this attorney would brazenly attempt to smuggle in a large quantity of THC into one of our biggest jails is further proof of why paper documents brought by visitors should be scanned and downloaded electronically onto tablets before entering our facilities,” he said in the June press release.

He also praised the officers’ “quick thinking and diligence.”

The lawsuit accuses Boscio and the union of defamation.

“Given the widely known unreliability of the field tests, the corrections officers should have known better, the City should have known better, and Benny Boscio should have kept his mouth shut,” said Caceres’ lawyer, Earl Ward of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP. “Instead, they intentionally and recklessly tarnished the reputation of a bright young lawyer.”

Neither Boscio nor the Correction Department returned messages seeking comment.

Caceres, who’s now in private practice, said the ordeal has had lasting impact on his career. He went from preparing for his first felony trial to spending the next year fielding questions from clients about his arrest.

For a month and a half, he lost his “secure pass” for the court system, which meant he couldn’t meet clients in court holding cells prior to their appearances.

The Brooklyn Defenders Services — which took over the public defender contract for Queens after the Queens Defenders founder was indicted in an embezzlement scheme — stood behind Caceres and kept him on after the arrest, he said.

He hasn’t yet returned to Rikers Island to interview a client, he said, though he now says he has a “deeper understanding of the misjustices that happen in the system.”

“I will do whatever needs to be done in order to adequately defend and represent someone, but the fear exists, the fear about being in Rikers,” he said. “It affects me negatively as an attorney because I want to be able to say that I’d go through hell and fury for all of my clients, but it does have an effect.”

©2026 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.