“Mr. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings,” the judge said.
The small, white kitten looked sad with its concerned eyes darting back and forth. The kitten opened its mouth to speak.
“Can you hear me judge?” Ponton said, appearing in the cat filter.
“I’m here, live, I’m not a cat,” he said a few seconds later.
Ferguson confirmed the Zoom mishap happened on Tuesday.
“It did actually happen. There was no joke involved,” Ferguson told CNN via phone.
The Zoom filter was removed within seconds of that moment, Ferguson said. He added that he walked the lawyer through how to turn it off.
“When a child had been using the computer, (the child) turned on a filter,” he said. “Of course, the lawyer would have no reason to even know that feature exists.”
CNN reached out to Ponton, the county attorney for Presido County, but did not hear back. A person who answered the phone at his office said the office was receiving a lot of calls.
Virtual hearings have been a mainstay during the pandemic and it’s no different in Texas. Ferguson said Texas judges have held more than a million virtual hearings at this point.
While it may have looked very “un-purr-fessional,” the judge was proud of how all sides handled the situation.
“If you watch carefully, no one mocked him or laughed at him,” Ferguson said. “It just showed the professionalism and the dignity that these lawyers bring to virtual hearings.”
Ferguson used his Twitter account to give the world a public service announcement about using Zoom.
So please, heed this advice: Check your filters first, then Zoom on, my furry friends.
Source: CNN – US News
