A jury has found Judge Jeffrey Ferguson, 74, guilty of second-degree murder, for the drunken fatal shooting of his wife in Anaheim Hills two years ago. Sentencing is scheduled June 13, and hopefully until that time he is kept somewhere where he cannot harm himself or others, especially with firearms.
I think that my advice for the Judge to try to negotiate it down to voluntary manslaughter looks pretty good. And my guess is that his lawyers did try it, if he permitted them to do so, but maybe he didn’t want to live with half a loaf.
Sentencing will be per California Code, Penal Code – PEN § 190(a), in what should be (but apparently isn’t) 190(a)(2):
(a) Every person guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death, imprisonment in the state prison for life without the possibility of parole, or imprisonment in the state prison for a term of 25 years to life. The penalty to be applied shall be determined as provided in Sections 190.1, 190.2, 190.3, 190.4, and 190.5.
Except as provided in subdivision (b), (c), or (d), every person guilty of murder in the second degree shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for a term of 15 years to life.
My guess is that Judge Ferguson (as I’ll still call him) will get around a 18-20-year sentence, because there are so many ways that it could be whittled down: time off for good behavior, early release for “health issues,” the need to make rooms for “actual convicts” (we know what that means, right?), and the possibility of executive clemency. If any of that means that he actually serves under 10 years, it would likely (and reasonably) taken as evidence that the system didn’t take his crime (and, by extension, his wife’s life) that seriously.
I expect that he will serve in a minimum security facility, though probably not all the way to “Club Fed” style (let alone “home arrest”), which probably seems fair. I don’t think he’s going to turn desperado, nor does he seem likely to be protected from family members seeking vengeance. It will be interesting to hear his former in-laws victim impact statements.
I hope he will be given the opportunity to prepare videos that speak to other gun owners. The theory is that, even if you’re drunk off your ass, you know never to retrieve your firearm from (ideally) lock and key unless it is a response to a threat of serious bodily injury or death. I believe that most gun owners think that they will live up to that. Judge Ferguson can tell a story about how that ain’t necessarily so. That may generate a larger public discussion that would save more lives than the Judge himself took.
I presume that he’ll be disbarred (“moral turpitude” and such), but I expect that he could still have a busy practice as a “courthouse lawyer” — writing motions and writs for people who couldn’t get the help they needed before their trials. And that would indeed be something good coming out of this, because so many people are so underserved.
As I’ve said, I don’t recall ever having argued before Judge Ferguson, but I truly hope that he find contrition and meaning in a life of service to the less fortunate during his incarceration. This is an enormous fall for him, but it may be a long time before he joins his wife in death, and what he does between now and then may add a paragraph of hope and redemption at the end of his biography.
I’m certainly interested in hearing from gun owners about how to solve the “go get the gun to use as a way of winning an argument” disaster that took his wife’s life. (I’ve wondered if a recording of Darrel Issa’s voice popping up when someone gets close to the location of their gun saying “MOVE AWAY FROM THE GUN!” might help. More seriously I like the idea of gun vaults being tied directly to a 911 hotline, like the ‘break glass in case of fire” stations supposedly have.) This is one of the major problems with private gun ownership (yes, there are others, I know) and may the Judge’s upcoming sentencing give that topic greater public urgency.
a sad note, Judge Ferguson has been drunk the majority of the last 20+ years … his decisions in court were an indication that he was financially motivated, and made so much money from the courts, that the facts, laws and evidence were never important ..
I’d heard that he was a pretty good and fair judge.
People who own guns are twice as likely to die by them.
https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/news/californians-living-handgun-owners-twice-likely-die-homicide
Do you know the statistics for their spouses or household members? I believe that most of the cases you’re talking about are suicides, rather than, say, accidents, having the gun wrenched away from them by home invaders, having their kids find the guns and shooting the owner, etc.
Suicides, in turn, range between the long-planned and spur-of-the-moment. The long-planned ones are ones we probably just have to live with under current 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, so unless we allow more painless and less bloody means of suicide (likely massive opiate injections), I don’t really blame guns themselves for those. I do blame guns for making accidents and spur-of-the-moment suicides more likely.
I mention this because we need to hone in on the real problems we’re addressing when figuring out how to ameliorate them. Shooting a spouse who does not present an imminent mortal threat is certainly among those.
Thank f’in god. What a disgrace to the bar, the bench and humanity. Truly a sick individual. Another stain on the local bench that Judge Hernandez has been forced to address.