Nangle also is arguing that taking his pension away would leave him “destitute,” and thus, violates his constitutional rights to protection from excessive fines. A Lowell District Court judge rejected that argument, too, ruling in late January that Nangle has three jobs, including a relatively new role as executive director of anti-Internet gambling nonprofit, Stop iGaming in Massachusetts, that pays him $6,000 a month, court documents show.

Nangle now works with those struggling with addiction, and has spoke openly about his own addiction, including last year when he spoke in favor of a bill that puts new limits on online sports betting.

“Every step of the plaintiff’s current path is paved toward a road of redemption — not only for himself, but for others as well,” Lowell District Court Judge Pacinco M. DeCapua, Jr., wrote in a court fuling.

But that work notwithstanding, Nangle’s actions were both a significant breach of public trust and “a pattern of behavior over a long period of time,” DeCapua wrote. He wrote in another decision that Nangle’s official role and convictions couldn’t be separated, saying it was “only because he had been a member of the House of Representatives at the relevant time that he was in a position to illegally withdraw funds from his campaign account.”

“Those actions dishonored his title as a State Representative,” DeCapua wrote.

Nangle has repeatedly denied that there was a link, arguing in court documents that his convictions were instead “personal in nature.”

Prosecutors said Nangle, then a member of the House Ethics Committee, had stolen $70,000 from his campaign to feed his gambling addiction, and bilked a local bank out of more than $300,000 in loan money that he wasn’t qualified to receive.

The charges destroyed his political career in 2020, and Nangle eventually pleaded guilty, getting a 15-month prison sentence the next year.

But, Nangle argued in recent court documents, that should not mean he should lose his pension benefits, which is valued at roughly $806,000, according to court filings.

Nangle said his convictions didn’t involve “governmental funds or property” and were in “no way” directly related to his office or his position. A state hearing officer that handled his pension case concluded that Nangle also engaged in “uncharged criminal conduct,” namely allegations that he helped to push a tax credit proposal through the House in exchange for two payments from a property development company, according to court documents.

The hearing officer determined Nangle tried to cover up the “bribes” by falsely claiming he was working as a “consultant.”

Nangle, in turn, said the state retirement board “improperly relied upon facts” that weren’t part of his conviction in reaching its decision.

“This Court should reverse the judgment of the District Court and order that the action of the [Retirement] Board be reversed because the Board’s forfeiture is unsupported by the law and evidence,” Nangle wrote in his appeal.

Efforts to reach Nangle and his attorney, Timothy Smyth, were not successful Tuesday.

Public officials have a long, and often checkered, history in fighting pension decisions in court.

Last year, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a decision to strip a former state trooper of $1 million in retirement payouts after he was convicted as part of the department’s wide-ranging overtime fraud scandal was not excessive, citing the severity of his crime.

Former House Speaker Thomas Finneran in 2017 lost his legal fight for his pension, too, after the SJC ruled his federal conviction was related to his former office. Finneran, who resigned as speaker in 2004, pleaded guilty in federal court three years later to obstruction of justice for lying under oath in a federal civil lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the state’s 2001 redistricting plan.

Generally speaking, state officials can only revoke pensions of those convicted of crimes if they’re related to their public employment. But they aren’t always slam dunks either.

A year before Finneran’s decision, for example, the SJC ruled that a retired Peabody police lieutenant could collect his pension despite a criminal conviction for a job-related offense. In that case, Edward A. Bettencourt was convicted of 21 counts of unauthorized use of a computer system for logging on to a state database in 2004 to check civil service scores of 21 officers, including four who were competing with him for an open captain’s position.

He was fined $10,500 for the misdemeanor offenses but received no jail time. The SJC ruled at the time that stripping Bettencourt of his entire pension is “not proportional to the gravity of the underlying offenses of which he was convicted.”

Nangle cites that decision in making his argument that losing his pension, too, is “grossly disproportional to the gravity” of his criminal offenses. As a “retirement age individual” — Nangle is 65 years old — the all-or-nothing penalty of losing his pension would leave him destitute, he said.

“These errors are so substantial and material,” Smyth wrote in Nangle’s appeal, “that failure to correct them will result in manifest injustice to Nangle.”

Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.