Inmate Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison for Making Threats to Harm Federal Judge

FRESNO, Calif. — U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. O’Neill sentenced Craig Shults, 52, of Huntington Beach, today to six years in prison for threatening to harm a federal judge, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

Shults was convicted of this offense following a December 2018 jury trial.

According to court documents and evidence at trial, in 2016 at a federal prison in Taft, California, Shults, then an inmate, made threats to assault a federal judge with the intent to retaliate against the judge for presiding over a prior criminal case involving Shults. He made the threatening communications in retaliation for, among other reasons, being remanded to custody following a bond violation hearing, and being sentenced to a substantially longer prison sentence than Shults requested. Some of Shults’s threats were captured on a recording device and presented at trial.

This case was the product of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys Angela L. Scott and Henry Z. Carbajal prosecuted the case.