Marylue Wigglesworth (Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office).
A New Jersey woman who shot and killed her abusive husband on Christmas Day in 2022 has been sentenced to spend several years behind bars, the Garden State court system announced this week.
In early June, Marylue Wigglesworth, 53, accepted a plea deal on one count of manslaughter in the second degree for the Dec. 25, 2022, homicide of David B. Wigglesworth, 53, a union member, Republican Party activist, and onetime candidate for local office in Mercer County.
On Tuesday, she was sentenced to six years in state prison. Under the terms of the No Early Release Act, she will have to serve just over five years and 1 month before she is eligible for parole.
The minimum sentence for second-degree manslaughter in New Jersey is five years in prison. Wigglesworth, though sentenced over the minimum, negotiated with the prosecution that neither side would argue for more or less than six years. And, perhaps more significantly, she avoided the uncertainty of a trial where she was likely to have faced a charge of murder in the first degree.
Wigglesworth will also receive credit for the substantial time she served in pre-trial detention, her defense attorney told Law&Crime.
But there was never any doubt — or argument to the contrary — that Wigglesworth herself was the one who squeezed the trigger.
The since-condemned woman has consistently maintained she "feared for her life" when she killed her husband on the night in question — saying she acted in self-defense. She was originally accused of cold-blooded murder and her defense attorney long insisted she was "overcharged" by overzealous prosecutors.
In January 2023, Atlantic County Assistant Prosecutor Seth Levy told the superior court that David Wigglesworth was "naked and in bed with the TV on" when he was shot and killed by his wife — portraying the shooting as a considered act of cruelty.
Defense attorney Melissa Rosenblum, in response, said her client suffered abuse, including bruising and injuries to her arm and torso, from her husband that night — and alleged that police had, for some time, withheld key evidence from the defense.
"What the state did not do and did not present, your honor, is that when she did talk to the police, she admitted that she shot him," the attorney said. "She stated at least six times to the officers that there was a fight and an altercation. They never took pictures of her that night to see what her injuries or bruising were, or at least I have not received them, your honor."
Atlantic County Superior Court Judge Patricia M. Wild, in turn, twice denied the defendant bail, based on the "severity" of the charges and the "presumption of detention" that navigates how violent crimes are handled in New Jersey — despite the court's initial bail denial being methodically rubbished by an appeals court in February 2023.
In New Jersey, criminal justice reform largely eliminated the use of a cash bail system in 2017 – though monetary bail can be used in rare instances. For lesser criminal charges, there is a presumption in favor of pretrial release. For more serious charges, like murder, the presumption is for detention.
On Valentine's Day in 2023, Marylue Wigglesworth was denied bail again — with the court endorsing the law enforcement narrative of when and how the shooting occurred, including the claim the woman's husband was "lying in bed naked" when he was killed.
At that description of the night's events, the defendant vigorously shook her head in disagreement before dropping it in apparent disappointment, her hair falling in front of her face as she sat silently upon hearing the news that she would remain in pretrial detention.
Since she accepted the plea deal, the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office aligned its understanding of the killing night significantly with the version of events the woman advanced all along.
"During the plea, the defendant stated that before the shooting, she and her husband engaged in an argument," a Wednesday press release reads. "The victim, David, physically assaulted the defendant and threatened her with a firearm that he kept in their bedroom. Immediately following the threat, the defendant shot the victim with the firearm used in the assault. Officers investigating the homicide documented significant bruising throughout the defendant's body following the homicide, consistent with being the victim of an assault."
In comments to Law&Crime, Marylue Wigglesworth's attorney stressed she did not believe that her client would have been convicted of murder had they gone to trial. Rosenblum added that intimate partner violence, what used to be referred to as "battered woman syndrome," is an "imperfect" self-defense.
Editor's note: this story has been amended post-publication to clarify criminal justice reform impacts on New Jersey's bail laws and to include a response from Marylue Wigglesworth's attorney.