SILVERTON – Sixth Judicial District Chief Judge Gregory Lyman sentenced Michael McFarland to two years in prison Friday for killing his wife, Jessica, after he threw a bottle at her last summer at their downtown Silverton home.
McFarland faced anywhere from probation to three years’ incarceration after a jury convicted him of negligent homicide in April.
At the sentencing hearing, McFarland, who did not testify at his own trial, told the judge he never touched the broken glass that killed Jessica and cast himself as the primary victim of his wife’s death.
“I’ve had my constitutional rights taken away, my kids used as leverage, my world destroyed,” he said. “I have been punished in the worst way possible for the last year with my kids being taken away and the loss of my wife – my best friend, the mother of my children. No one knows the strength I pray for each day to keep going for my kids.”
Lyman said he was sad to see that McFarland was in “denial.”
He said be believed Ladonna Jaramillo, a neighbor who testified during the trial that on the night Jessica died, Michael McFarland told her Jessica threw a bottle at him, and he threw it back at Jessica. Jessica, he said, was bleeding from the neck.
Lyman also said he found the bevy of expert witnesses, who testified that the physical evidence proved McFarland threw the mug at Jessica, causing the wounds that killed her, conclusive.
Lyman said he hoped McFarland eventually would be able to care for his children – after spending two years in the Department of Corrections. While McFarland faces a two-year sentence, he is not, however, going to prison just yet.
Last week, McFarland’s defense attorney, Joel Fry, moved for a new trial based on a letter written by Timothy Hewett – one of the 12 jurors who convicted McFarland – in which Hewett writes he only voted to convict McFarland because he “misinterpreted the definition of ‘negligence.’”
At the sentencing hearing, Lyman denied Fry’s motion for an acquittal. But he agreed to grant McFarland bail pending an appeal.
“I am not going to have Michael sitting in prison if there’s any reasonable chance that a court could appeal the verdict,” he said. “That needs to be sorted out before he serves his sentence.”
Asked how long an appeal might take, District Attorney Todd Risberg said he did not know.
At the San Juan County Courthouse, more than 60 people crowded the courtroom gallery. Many spectators shed tears, while Jessica’s mother and sister begged Lyman to sentence McFarland to the maximum.
Jessica’s sister, Shannon Hidalgo, choked with grief, said, “She was real. And now she’s really gone. ... I am shocked by the McFarlands’ lack of remorse. I don’t think there’s going to be any closure, unless Michael serves a full sentence.”
Risberg expressed incredulity at McFarland’s strategy of blaming “everyone but himself – Jessica, me, the police, the justice system and even the jury” for his wife’s death. He said despite being convicted of negligent homicide by a jury, McFarland showed no remorse for his actions and therefore could not benefit from rehabilitation.
“If he’d just taken responsibility from the beginning, he’d probably have done his time and be with his children by now,” he said.
Instead, Risberg said, McFarland still refuses to acknowledge his history of rage, violence, drug use and domestic violence, as well as the crucial role he played in killing his wife. “Even now,” Risberg said, McFarland “is hiding behind his children” in requesting probation, a form of moral cowardice that raised questions about “his fitness as a parent.”
Risberg said according to the pre-sentencing report, McFarland was at high risk of recommitting domestic violence.
He read aloud text messages that Jessica sent in the days before she died that could not be admitted as evidence during trial. In text after text, Jessica alluded to McFarland’s drug use and violent temper; at one point she decried “men who hit women” in a text expressing disappointment with Michael.
After Lyman rendered his sentence, the pain in the courtroom was palpable.
Jessica’s mother, Linda Davis, stood shocked and dumbfounded, then cried out; Hidalgo sobbed. Supporters enveloped them without words.
On the other side of the courtroom, some of McFarland’s family members quietly cried, too, while others smiled out of deep relief that they still had their son.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
