DEPUTY GIVEN 2-YEAR TERM

TAMPA - A former Pasco County sheriff's deputy was sentenced Friday to
two years in federal prison for participating in a drug ring by using
his patrol car and service weapon to rob a man he thought was a drug
courier.

Don Riggans, 35, tearfully apologized to the court, prosecutors, the
community and his family for not only breaking the law, but going
against everything he said he stood for.

He told U.S. District Judge Richard Lazzara he did it to get money so
he could pay off debts and purchase a dream house for his wife and
young daughters. The hardest thing he ever had to do, Riggans said in
an emotion-choked voice, was look his daughters in the eye and explain
his crime.

Riggans' wife, Kimberly, also a Pasco sheriff's deputy, tearfully
pleaded for mercy, saying one horrible mistake should not define who
her husband is as a person.

"His actions were a betrayal to both me and our profession," Kimberly
Riggans said. "We need him and we've already suffered so much."

In passing sentence, Lazzara said he'd ask a question he always asks
when former law enforcement officers stand in front of him: "Who
protects us from the protectors?"

The judge added that crimes like this damage the public's faith in law
enforcement. "This undermines the rule of law, and without the rule of
law, we are nothing as a people or a society."