Deputies contacted [Lloyd Jeffrey Wiatt] on Wednesday at his home in Valencia, and during the conversation, the judge became distraught, [Dan Rosenberg] said. Worried that he was suicidal, detectives began monitoring his movements using a commercial anti-theft tracking device that Wiatt had on his car.

In 1999, during the trial of Sylmar widow Jeanie Adair -- who was accused of bludgeoning her husband, Robert, to death with a baseball bat for insurance money -- Wiatt's outspoken manner was on display, said Marsh Goldstein, the prosecutor in the case.

After a jury acquitted Adair, Wiatt declared her "factually innocent," an unusual ruling that would have erased records of her arrest and criminal trial. But state appellate judges reversed the ruling in 2001, finding that Wiatt abused his discretion.