The Providence Retirement Board’s award of a partial pension to Frank Corrente, convicted of public corruption as director of administration and chief aide to disgraced former Mayor Vincent Cianci, has properly outraged many citizens.

As one of Mayor Cianci’s most distinguished bagmen and fixers, he joined his boss in grotesquely violating the public trust. But the board, in its intriguing wisdom, has decided that since Mr. Corrente has not been proven to have engaged in wrongdoing in his previous municipal work — as a financial specialist and city controller — that he should receive $22,231 a year for his service then, if not for his time as director of administration. He would have gotten a $70,576-a-year pension for full honorable service in his municipal career. (The median household income in Rhode Island is a bit over $50,000.)

Mayor David Cicilline, whose administration has strongly pressed for revocation of the pension, denounced the decision and will take the case to Superior Court.

Quite right.

One board member opposed to this 7-to-5 ruling, Carla Dowben, aptly called this “presumed innocent until caught.” But once someone has demonstrated such serious, pervasive corruption, the pension, by most measures of justice, should be completely withdrawn.

A city ordinance requires “honorable service” as a prerequisite for a pension and mandates that a dishonorable employee’s pension be revoked or reduced upon conviction of a job-related crime. Assisting the former mayor in presiding over what federal prosecutors successfully argued in court was a major “criminal conspiracy” run out of City Hall would seem to fit the bill for revoking all pension money!

Meanwhile, Councilman John Igliozzi has wisely noted that the Retirement Board’s action would undermine its legal position in defending its revocations of city pensions for former Police Chief Urbano Prignano and former Parks Department office manager Kathleen Parsons.

That makes it all the more pressing that a Superior Court judge, who must decide on this issue, apply what most citizens would see as common sense and justice and revoke all of Frank Corrente’s municipal pension. It’s not only a question of proper punishment of Mr. Corrente himself. The precedent that Retirement Board is setting could do great damage.