OCALA, Fla. — A 24-year-old Boynton Beach man on Tuesday was sentenced to 37 months in federal person after pleading guilty to threatening a senior federal judge in Jacksonville and his wife.
Middle District of Florida Judge Roy B. Dalton, Jr. also sentenced Jeziah Guagno to three years probation at the courthouse in Ocala.
In October, he pleaded guilty to one count of mailing a handwritten, threatening letter to U.S. District Judge Harvey Erwin Schlesinger, 83, also in the Middle District of Florida.
Guagno had faced a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison. Prosecutors asked the judge to send him to prison for up to 46 months.
In May 2021, Schlesinger received a threatening letter from M.S., an inmate at the Santa Rosa Correctional Institution.
The letter included violent threats to murder the judge and his wife.
When interviewed, M.S. denied making the threats though he was also serving time in the same Florida prison as M.S.
A subsequent DNA and fingerprint analysis by the FBI determined that Guagno's DNA was on the envelope and his palm print was on the letter. Also, known handwriting samples from Guagno matched the handwritten threats in the letter.
The federal judge had been threatened in the letter previously had dismissed a civil case filed by Guagno.
Guagno had been serving time for a 2016 robbery, aggravated assault and a hit-and-run crash where he had no driver’s license in Palm Beach County, according to court records. In 2018, he was also convicted of punching a fellow inmate in Suwannee Correctional Institution.
Guagno suffers from such serious mental illness that it delayed the criminal case against him for 17 months until he could be treated.
