Ferguson said, as he had in the past, that he did not mean to fire the gun.
“I understand the jury’s verdict, but it was a horrific accident,” he said.
“I have enormous grief not for myself alone but for my son, Phillip, and Sheryl’s brothers. For me, Sheryl didn’t die just once, August 3, 2023. She dies again and again every morning I wake up.”
He said his wife had “a great and generous heart”.
“I wish God had taken me instead,” he said.
Ferguson’s son, Phillip Ferguson, who was with his parents the night his mother was killed and called 911 to report the shooting, testified at the hearing that he and his mother had been worried about Jeffrey Ferguson’s drinking but had never felt in danger.
He said that his parents would argue but that they also loved each other and laughed together.
“I cannot draw any other conclusion than that my mother’s death had been accidental,” Phillip Ferguson said.
“If I harboured any doubts of this in my mind, I could not stand to look my father in the eye, nor to hug him, nor to even call him my father.”
Prosecutors said that Ferguson had pulled a pistol from an ankle holster and shot his wife once in the chest at close range, as they watched television in the living room of their home in Anaheim Hills, a community southeast of Los Angeles.
Phillip Ferguson told authorities after the shooting that Sheryl Ferguson had told her husband, “Why don’t you point a real gun at me?” prosecutors said.
Earlier that night, Jeffrey Ferguson had used his fingers to simulate pointing a gun at his wife during an argument at a Mexican restaurant, prosecutors said.
After the shooting, Phillip Ferguson performed CPR on his mother, following the instructions of emergency dispatchers, prosecutors said.
When the police arrived, they found that Sheryl Ferguson had been fatally shot and that her husband smelled of alcohol and was wearing an ankle holster, which was empty, court documents said.
The police later executed a search warrant at the home and recovered 48 weapons, including rifles, shotguns and handguns, and more than 26,000 rounds of ammunition, prosecutors said.
Ferguson was suspended without pay after his conviction in April. He has not been formally removed from the Bench, although that is expected to happen now that he has been sentenced, according to Kimberly Edds, a spokesperson for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
Judge Eleanor Hunter of Los Angeles County Superior Court, who oversaw the trial because Ferguson had served on the Orange County bench, said Ferguson knew that he should not handle a gun while drinking and angry.
But Ferguson “doesn’t pay attention to the rules”, Hunter said. “He doesn’t believe the rules apply to him.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Levenson
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
