Seattle Cop Faces Prison For Taking Bribes To Pay Debts

A lifetime of good work by a city police officer was undone in a few moral lapses brought on by debts.

That was how both sides described the predicament of ex-officer Darryl Stone, sentenced Friday to five months in prison for taking bribes in the first such case in Seattle in two decades.

Besides the five-month prison term for obstruction of commerce, Stone was ordered to serve three years of supervised release, including five months on house arrest.

Stone, 32, estimated he had spent about 200,000 hours in police work. But his downfall was the less than six hours of that time in which he asked and received more than $5,000 from four motorists between March 1994 and last September in exchange for failing to process drunken driving citations.

He was caught after Jacqueline Docherty of Spokane reported his offer to make a ticket “go away” for $600 and Sonics tickets.