Threats Against Judges ‘Totally Unacceptable,’ Roberts Says (1)

Chief Justice John Roberts decried politically driven threats against judges, saying litigants and others should fully exercise the judicial or legislative process for addressing disagreements with court decisions.

Appearing at a judicial conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday, Roberts touched on security concerns that have escalated over the years as rulings by federal judges, especially, cut against political interests on both sides of the ideological divide.

“We have had serious threats of violence and murder of judges just simply for doing their work.” So I think the political people on both sides of the aisle need to keep that in mind,” Roberts said, adding that there were other outlets to resolve disagreements instead.

“Threatening the judges for doing their job is totally unacceptable and people should be careful about doing that,” Robert said.

Roberts didn’t address any specific threats or political parties or politicians, but other judges and legal figures have condemned recent attacks on the judiciary by President Donald Trump and his allies over rulings that have gone against his policies.

There also have been threats and other troubling actions directed against liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices over hot-button issues as well as the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home in 2022.

Threats Increase

There were more than 400 threats against nearly 300 federal judges from the start of October to mid-June, according to US District Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey.

Salas, who spoke about threats at a recent event and shared the data with Bloomberg Law, has spearheaded judicial security efforts since the murder of her son at their home by a disgruntled attorney in 2020.

Politically fueled ire against judges has flared from the right recent months. Trump and his allies have bashed them on social media for rulings against his administration’s policies on immigration and efforts to overhaul the federal workforce especially. In a Truth Social post in May, the president referred to judges as “USA hating” and “monsters.”

Unsolicited pizzas have also been sent to the homes of federal judges and Supreme Court justices and their family members—interpreted as a threat that the sender knows where they live—including over a dozen sent in the name of Salas’ murdered son.

In another case in recent years, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s court in the Northern District of Texas received death threats and harassment in the midst of litigation over the abortion pill, which he temporarily restricted access to.

Top judiciary officials have asked Congress for more funding to shore up security, including a 19% increase in funding for court security measures.

Court Deliberations

Roberts in a sit-down interview with Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit didn’t address the just-completed term during which the conservative-led court handed Trump a number of victories. The court let him discharge transgender people from the military, fire top officials at government agencies, and open hundreds of thousands of migrants to deportation.

The justices repeatedly reinstated Trump policies found by lower courts to be illegal, and it undercut judges who said the administration had violated their orders. On Friday, it restricted the power of judges to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential initiatives.

Roberts did speak on the deliberative dynamics between the justices and said that collaboration and understanding the other justices’ thinking is “such an important part of it.”

Roberts said this was especially important toward the end of the term, “when we’re often issuing opinions where there’s a lot of sharp division and some sharp adjectives employed.”

The justices have stressed their collegiality as the court’s makeup has become more divisive along ideological lines. But the final rulings of the most recent term exposed some sharp tensions on the court and their views of the law, particularly in Trump’s case over the ability of judges to issue universal injunctions.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court’s 6-3 conservative bloc in the injunctions matter that surfaced in Trump’s bid to restrict automatic birthright citizenship. She sharply criticized the dissents of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, even calling Jackson out by name.

Barrett, a conservative, wrote that Jackson, a liberal, was promoting “a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush,” while avoiding legal issues she found “boring.”

“Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: ‘Everyone, from the President on down, is bound by law,’” Barrett wrote. ”That goes for judges too.”

Jackson accused Barrett and the other conservatives of dwelling on “impotent English tribunals.”