Judges’ Mental Well-Being Gets New Attention as Threats Rise (1)

After a day of sentencing criminal defendants, Judge Lee Yeakel made a ritual of replaying each hearing in his head and worry whether he’d gotten them right.

“I would go home that night, and I always used to joke that was the day the Johnnie Walker company made more money than it normally did,” said Yeakel, who stepped down as a Texas federal judge in 2023 and is now a member of the Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates for judicial independence

The next day, he’d put the cases behind him. “Because if you don’t, the job would just eat you up,” he said.

Judging can be emotionally taxing, whether it’s managing social isolation or presiding over cases involving child exploitation crimes or the death penalty.

The recent uptick in threats has heightened concerns around well-being and prompted new efforts to address it, including roundtables and support networks for federal judges, steps former judges say are long overdue.

“It is a stressful job. To feel stressed from directions we hadn’t in the past has to exacerbate that,” said retired Judge Allyson Duncan, an Article III Coalition member who previously sat on the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Facing a drumbeat of threats takes a significant toll on a person, current and former judges said.

“It interferes with your sleep, it interferes with your whole psyche,” said Kathleen O’Malley, formerly a judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and for an Ohio federal trial court, who left the bench in 2022.

“It’s really escalated to the point where, I have often said, thank god I’m not a district court judge anymore,” O’Malley, also a member of the judges’ coalition, added.

After receiving a threat, some judges find themselves continuing to look over their shoulders.

Florida state Judge Carroll Kelly had to temporarily move out of her home after officers told her a disgruntled litigant with sniper training visited her house early one morning.

He wasn’t arrested, and “every day I still am looking,” she said at a Sept. 25 virtual event hosted by judicial advocacy group Speak Up for Justice.

‘Steady Growth’

For Jeremy Fogel, a former federal trial judge in California, increasing the focus on judicial well-being is a project decades in the making.

Fogel worked as a mental health advocate before he became a federal judge, and he said there he initially encountered “a lot of resistance” from judges in discussing well-being issues when he first joined the bench.

“The dominant theme was, you just decide the case, and you can go get exercise. If you had a hard case, you could get an extra cocktail,” said Fogel, who is now executive directive of the Berkeley Judicial Institute. “It was really seen as an inappropriate thing to talk to judges about.”

However, Fogel has seen a “steady growth” in more interest and understanding in the decades since, as the federal bench has welcomed women and younger generations. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic five years ago further boosted interest in the issue, and the recent uptick in threats has made the stress judges feel “more acute,” he said.

Fogel has participated in more than a dozen presentations and seminars on judicial well-being since January, in what he said has been his busiest year ever for the topic.

Judge J. Michelle Childs of the Washington federal appeals court said she’s focusing on judicial well-being now in her new role as chair of the Appellate Judges Conference of the American Bar Association’s judicial division and moderated a webinar on the subject in late September.

“I felt like this was a good time to speak about threats to the judiciary and allow judges a safe space and have a professional come in who is studying these issues,” Childs said in an interview.

The surge in threats against the judiciary comes as President Donald Trump and conservative allies have also amplified verbal attacks against judges and their families.

In one case, right-wing activist Laura Loomer posted a photo of the daughter of the Rhode Island federal judge who’d ruled against the Trump administration on social media, which was re-posted by Elon Musk.

The threats span the ideological spectrum. Nicholas John Roske is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday for attempting to assassinate a Supreme Court justice. Roske, who faces up to 30 years in prison, was arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022, and he planned to assassinate three justices following the leak of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to the government’s sentencing memo.

The escalating threats are “concretely extremely distressing to judges today in a way that I do think is new,” said Terry Maroney, a Vanderbilt Law School professor who studies the role of emotion in judging.

Judges can endure more occupational stress if they feel like their work is in service for something they believe in. However, this “new era of extreme vilification and highly personalized insults and threats from within the government” can “threaten that sense of being a valued part of the democratic project,” Maroney said.

A spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the US Courts said the judiciary provides an employee assistance program that offers “around-the-clock confidential counseling and referral services” to help people manage “stress, substance abuse, grief, marital or family problems, and legal or financial issues.”

Judges and employees also have access to six free confidential counseling sessions per year, the spokesperson said.

Recruitment fears

Current members of the bench said the threats could deter lawyers from wanting to become judges in the future.

Judge John C. Coughenour, a senior judge on the Seattle federal trial court, was recently the victim of a swatting incident, when someone made an emergency call claiming he’d murdered his wife to send law enforcement presence to his residency, and of an anonymous bomb threat.

He said in an interview the “thought never entered my mind” when he went through the process of becoming a judge in 1981 that he was putting himself at risk of harm, and that while he’d received criticism over his decades-long career on the bench, he’d never before experienced incidents like those.

Coughenour is one of several sitting judges, who have cited the effects on their family members as particularly distressing.

“Are there some people who would say, I just don’t want to take that on for my family? The unsettling atmosphere that exists around the judiciary today. Are we losing some qualified, talented people who otherwise would have made wonderful judges?” Coughenour said. “That’s very troublesome.”