OURAY COP GETS 19 YEARS

He was a good cop gone bad, dishonoring his badge, his children, and his god.

He cried about it on Friday, and said he was sorry, and begged a judge for
mercy.

He was sentenced to federal prison for 19 years.

"I have dishonored and disgraced my community, my family and the ones
closest to my heart," former Ouray County Undersheriff John Radcliff, 42,
said in federal court.

He blamed it on meth and his own stupidity, his own dishonesty, ignorance
and weakness.

A jury convicted him last summer of participating in a methamphetamine ring
that, for about two years, brought the drug from California to Ouray
County. Radcliff used the drug with his wife, Lisa, whose brother, Perry
Wherley, was a ringleader in the drug operation.

Radcliff helped keep other law officers from finding out about it.

"I fell victim to evil ways and a very powerful drug," Radcliff said.

He was a good deputy sheriff in Ouray County for seven years. "I loved what
I did," he said.

When a family friend suffered a stroke, Radcliff regularly drove him to
Montrose for rehabilitation.

Radcliff and his wife were foster parents.

He also served 11 years as an emergency medical technician with the fire
department, nine years on a mountain rescue team, five years on the board
of 911 -- and some of those programs he founded.

"The guilt is tearing me apart because I have lost what I truly loved
doing," Radcliff said.

The case brought down former Ouray County Sheriff Jerry Wakefield, two of
whose daughters were implicated in the ring.

It also revealed complicated, interlocking relationships and rivalries
among residents practicing the flourishing drug trade in the small,
picturesque town at the base of the San Juan Mountains on Colorado's
Western Slope.

Also implicated in the case, for instance, was former Ouray County Deputy
Sheriff Leroy Dale Todd, who once dated Brenda Paul, who is Wherley's aunt
and also was accused of participating in the ring.

"What I did was wrong and totally against what I believe in," Radcliff
said. "This is the mistake that I have been paying for daily."

He stopped talking then because he couldn't stop crying.

A deputy U.S. marshal handed him tissues.

"God bless you," Radcliff finally told Denver U.S. District Judge Edward
Nottingham.

Todd also was sentenced Friday. He, too, apologized for hurting his family,
and he, too, begged for mercy.

And he said he was glad to be out of law enforcement, because it was so
stressful.

Nottingham sentenced him to 18 years in prison.