A former state representative, who once chaired the ethics committee, busted for trafficking methamphetamine near a school was issued a monitoring bracelet if he could post his $10,000 bail after his attorney pleaded with the judge to release his client because he is stricken with cancer.

“His life is on the line here literally. This is a man who is being treated for stage three cancer at Mass General Hospital,” defense attorney Vincent A. Murray Jr. said of his client Stephen W. Doran, 57, of Dorchester who was arrested as he left the Match Charter Middle School in Jamaica Plain with a package containing 480 grams of crystal meth.

Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Rakhi Lahiri had asked West Roxbury District Court Judge Michael Coyne this morning to hold Doran on $500,000 bail, saying he posed a flight risk because of his possible lengthy sentence — Doran faces a minimum mandatory sentence of 12 years in prison if convicted.

Doran is charged with trafficking methamphetamine over 200 grams and a controlled substance within a school zone. State police investigators nabbed him at 12:23 yesterday afternoon as he left the Match School, where he works as a tutor, in his Jeep Cherokee.

Inside the Jeep investigators found a U.S. Postal Service express mail parcel containing heat-sealed freezer baggies with 480 grams of crystal meth, Lahiri said.

Later when police searched Doran’s Dix Street home they found 38 grams of crystal meth, $10,000 cash, a digital scale and other drug paraphernalia, the prosecutor said.

Doran who pleaded not guilty to the charges, has been undergoing chemotherapy for the past 11 months and is not a flight risk, his attorney said.

“The cancer is so serious that his brother just recently died from the same cancer … Doran has,” Murray said.

“There is no question he has to return to Mass General on a regular basis otherwise he is going to die. So there is no question your honor that this man will be returning to court.”

A spokesman for the Match Charter Middle School said Doran had been a tutor at the school for nine months and passed a criminal background check. He is no longer working at the school, said the spokesman.

“We have no knowledge, nor any reason to believe, that any staff, teachers, or students were involved in this matter or were in danger in any way,” the spokesman said. “We are cooperating completely with the police investigation, and are conducting our own internally.”

Murray said that Doran, a father of four grown daughters, and who cares for his 93-year-old mother, worked 17 years as a mortgage executive at Bank of America and 14 years with the Commonwealth.

Doran, a Democratic state representative from 1980 to 1994, served on numerous legislative committees including education and government regulations, and chairing the ethics committee.

Prosecutors said he had an OUI arrest in Framingham in 1979 that was later dismissed, and a 2001 marijuana bust in Haverhill that was also dismissed.

Judge Coyne set Doran’s bail at $10,000 and ordered him to be fitted with an ankle bracelet and assigned to his home except for medical appointments.