NEW YORK (AP) – A Manhattan judge has ordered the police department’s medical board to rethink its “irrational” and “perplexing” decision to deny disability benefits to a police officer who says she contracted the AIDS virus on the job.

State Supreme Court Justice Rolando Acosta told the board to reconsider its findings in the case of a Nassau County resident and 12-year police veteran assigned to transit patrol who was diagnosed with HIV in May 1999.

The judge said city law states that a police officer who contracts HIV is presumed to have done so in the performance of his or her duties “and not as a result of his or her willful negligence, unless the contrary can be proved by competent evidence.”

“Petitioner established that she had been bitten and punched in both eyes while placing a [suspect] under arrest,” the judge wrote, and “she was in constant contact with bodily fluids of perpetrators in the subways and streets of New York City.”

The judge said those facts about the 35-year-old officer, an unmarried mother of two who is still on the police payroll, “establish even more than is required” under the municipal law’s “may have been exposed” language.

The officer’s lawyer, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that his client has “full-blown AIDS” and her condition has deteriorated. She now has kidney disease, a degenerative disease in her right foot, an ovarian cyst, a disease in her spine and chronic fatigue, he said.

City lawyers said that while the medical board agreed the officer has AIDS, they suspect she contracted it from sexual activity.

Assistant corporation counsel Carolyn Hafner claimed a statement from the officer’s physician, reported in the minutes of the medical board on July 18, 2001, said the officer told him she had acquired the AIDS virus through sexual activity.

Goldberg acknowledged that the statement was in the medical board’s minutes but said he had previously been unaware that the officer’s doctor said his client’s AIDS was caused by sexual activity.

City lawyers also said they were surprised that the judge issued a decision. They said they were considering whether to move to vacate the decision and reargue or have the medical board rehear the case, as the judge directed.

But Hafner said the officer had reapplied for benefits and city lawyers would probably ask the judge to vacate the decision and wait and see what the medical board does with the officer’s new application.

Goldberg said he would oppose a motion to vacate the decision. The lawyer also said he would oppose any attempt by the city to give his client anything less than an accidental disability pension, which is three-fourths of an officer’s pay and is untaxed. He said the city might try to give the officer a half-pay ordinary disability pension, which is taxable.

Inga Van Eysden, chief of the city’s pension division, said city lawyers were surprised about the ruling because they believed they had an agreement with Goldberg to wait until the board acted on the new application before asking the court to intervene.

Because of that supposed understanding, Van Eysden said, “We never appeared in court or submitted any papers.” She added that city lawyers never had an opportunity to contradict the “facts” that the judge cited as “unrefuted.”

Goldberg denied that he had any such agreement with city lawyers.