In Polarized Environments, Attorneys and Judges Face a Multitude of Threats
Judicial environments can become highly volatile and polarizing. Even within a democratic system, in these settings attorneys and judges may face a spectrum of threats from parties who feel aggrieved about a ruling or how the case was represented. An individual may feel so strongly that he or she decides to seek vengeance against an attorney or judge involved in a specific case.
Attorneys utilize their legal expertise to represent a party or person. Defense attorneys do not defend a crime or a polarized political issue—instead they argue for a defendant’s constitutionally enshrined civil rights and civil liberties, ensuring a defendant receives a just trial and legal proceedings. Threats may arise against attorneys, however, when a defendant or an external individual becomes so strongly aggrieved for various reasons that they take hostile action against an attorney, ranging from non-violent harassment to a violent attack.
The function of judges is to preside over court hearings and listen to the legal arguments of opposing parties in a case, whether in court or administrative proceedings. They conduct pretrial hearings, facilitate negotiations between opposing parties in various forms of arbitration, and issue legally binding decisions. They are also responsible for sentencing convicted criminal defendants. These responsibilities sometimes result in judges becoming the target of threats from defendants aggrieved about a ruling or from other individuals directly or indirectly affected by a case.
Types of Threats
Threats against attorneys and judges fall into the larger threat environment of workplace violence. There are four categories of workplace violence, categorized by the people initiating violence and the victim targeted in these incidents.
Most threats against attorneys and judges would be classified as Type II: where a customer, such as a defendant, acts against an employee, such as an attorney or a judge. However, it is also possible for violent incidents targeting attorneys and judges to be threatened by Type I (a violent attack by a person who has no legitimate business at the worksite, such as a robbery), Type III (worker-against-worker, or an aggrieved ex-worker against former workers), or Type IV (involving a personal relationship in which an individual who does not work at a law firm or courthouse attacks an employee with whom he or she has a conflictual personal relationship).
Within the predominant workplace violence category of Type II, five specific kinds of threats characterize the security challenges targeting attorneys and judges: physical violence, harassment via telecommunications and social media, physical harassment, doxing, and public denouncement. Within each threat type, the level of criticality can be plotted along a continuum from high (i.e., violent) to low (i.e., harassment). Even non-violent threats are considered critical because they can quickly escalate into violence.
Physical violence. Considered the most critical threat, a violent attack is intended to injure or kill the targeted victim. Some notable recent examples include the following.
19 July 2020: Roy Den Hollander, an attorney and self-proclaimed antifeminist and men’s rights activist, allegedly arrived at the New Brunswick, New Jersey, home of District Court Judge Esther Salas, killing her son and critically wounding her husband. Salas, who had presided over a case Hollander was involved in, was in the home’s basement at the time and was not injured. The FBI identified Hollander as the primary suspect in the shooting of Salas’s family, as well as the primary suspect in an 11 July shooting and murder of a rival civil rights attorney in San Bernardino, California. On 20 July, Hollander was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in upstate New York.
8 June 2022: Nicholas John Roske was charged with the attempted murder of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. After making threats against the judge, Roske was arrested when he was found near Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Roske pled not guilty and is scheduled for trial beginning in June 2025.
19 October 2023: Pedro Argote allegedly killed Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson in the driveway of the judge’s home in Hagerstown, Maryland. Wilkinson had presided over Argote’s divorce case, ultimately granting Argote’s ex-wife sole custody of the couple’s four children and sole possession of the family home. Roughly a week after Wilkinson’s murder, Argote was found dead.
19 September 2024: Former Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Stines is accused of opening fire and killing Judge Kevin Mullins in the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Prosecutors are still determining the motive behind the shooting, and Stines has pled not guilty.
Non-physical harassment. Harassment of a targeted victim can take many forms, although they primarily take the shape of non-violent types of hoaxes. These can include online trolling, “swatting” (in which a telephone call is made to 911 reporting a serious crime in the hopes that a police SWAT team will be deployed against an innocent target), ordering the delivery of unasked-for items to a targeted home to arouse paranoia, and defamation, such as spreading false information that negatively portrays the victim.
These forms of harassment can be unsettling to the intended target and his or her family, and they are often psychologically impactful, especially if the harassment revolves around the target’s family’s reputation and personal safety.
In the United States, the incidents of harassing threats against federal judges and prosecutors have substantially increased between 2021 and mid-2024, according to Ron Davis, the U.S. Marshals Service’s director.
The Marshals Service, Judicial Security Division, is responsible for securing federal judicial proceedings, federal judges, jurors, and other members of the federal judiciary. In 2021, the Marshals Service investigated 224 threats against federal judges, which rose to 457 threats in 2023. The number of federal prosecutors who were targeted more than doubled from 68 in 2021 to 155 in 2023.
In an example of swatting, on 25 December 2023, Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith was the subject of a fake emergency call that reported a shooting at his home. Several days later, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over former President Donald Trump’s Washington D.C. case, was similarly targeted with a fake emergency call.
Physical harassment. Attorneys and judges also face physical types of harassment that are intended to intimidate the targeted victim or victims.
Common physical hoaxes include using the mail system to send envelopes containing white powder that are intended to look like anthrax spores. These types of attacks fall between a threatening telephone call or email and arson.
On 28 February 2024, courthouse staff received an envelope that was addressed to New York Judge Arthur Engoron, who was presiding over Trump’s civil fraud trial. The envelope contained white powder that was found to be negative for hazardous substances, but the courthouse’s operations office, where the mail was opened, was briefly closed.
The number of federal prosecutors who were targeted by non-physical harassment more than doubled from 68 in 2021 to 155 in 2023.
Doxing. Doxing is the practice of publicly releasing, with malicious intent, private personal information about a target or his or her family members. This includes posting the target’s home address, personal telephone number, or email address on the Internet. This is done to incite others to further harass or attack the target.
On 6 September 2023, Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, asked a judge to protect the jurors who indicted Trump and his allies for their alleged attempts to reverse the state’s presidential election results in November 2020. The personal information of the 23 jurors, Willis, and other members of her office had been posted on conspiracy theory websites hosted by a Russian firm as part of what Willis considered an effort to harass and intimidate.
Public denouncement. Denouncement involves attacking a target in public, accusing him or her of being corrupt and a treasonous, demonized enemy. This type of public intimidation is intended to delegitimize the target’s credibility and incite others to conduct follow-up attacks, even physical ones, upon the target. This type of threat is especially pervasive during highly politically polarized periods.
Leading conspiracy theorist Alex Jones singled out Chris Mattei, an attorney representing one of the Sandy Hook School families in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a 14 June 2019 Infowars broadcast. During the broadcast, Jones issued a call-to-arms.
“…If they want war—you know, it’s not a threat. It’s like an AC/DC song. If you want blood, you’ve got it. Blood on the streets, man,” Jones said. Jones had previously suggested that Mattei had planted child pornography on Jones’s computers.
In another instance, James Vogts—an attorney representing Remington Firearms in a lawsuit filed against the company by the Sandy Hook shooting victims’ families—was the target. After Vogts and his client were ready to strike a deal with the families, an activist on X (formerly known as Twitter) criticized Vogts for his “subpar work,” adding that he “continues to lead to bad outcomes.” The activist then posted Vogts’s email address and telephone number.
Lastly, in the aftermath of his defeat in the November 2020 U.S. presidential election and throughout several court proceedings related to indictments for alleged illicit electoral and business dealings, including one conviction, former U.S. President Donald Trump continuously demonized the federal prosecutors and judges who presided over the trial cases.
In May 2024, Trump blasted New York Justice Juan Merchan on Truth Social. Merchan was overseeing the first criminal trial against a former U.S. president, Trump supporters on the platform were soon threatening the judge, even calling for the execution of Merchan and other judges presiding over other cases against Trump.
Mitigation Measures
To mitigate the risk of various threats against attorneys and judges, applying an enterprise security risk assessment is crucial. Risk management is a function of Risk = Threat (which identifies potential threat actors, their intent, and their capability to conduct an attack), Vulnerability (to be attacked), and Consequence of an attack (in terms of human, physical, financial, and other forms of damage). The correlation of these risk components will identify an overall risk score, likely potential scenarios for an attack, and a prioritization of risk mitigation measures to lower the overall risk.
In tracking a threat component, law enforcement agencies—such as the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service—employ behavioral threat assessment methodologies and technologies to monitor the pre-incident activities of individuals suspected of posing a potential threat to judges and attorneys. Law enforcement also relies on the private sector products that provide artificial intelligence-powered search engines and databases that monitor threat-based posts in social media, as well as facial recognition scanning algorithms to track a suspect’s physical locations, if available.
Although not as extensive as the security operations centers and technology employed by government agencies, the security departments of major law firms also apply threat assessment tools to identify potential threats against their attorneys. When necessary, these are reported to government agencies for follow-up investigations.
The vulnerability of a target, variables like the criticality or attractiveness of a target, the level of access to a target, and level of deterrence to prevent an attack can all be scored along a scale of low, medium, or high.
Once the risk assessment for each type of threat scenario is scored (either qualitatively or quantitatively in a risk register table), they can be prioritized from highest to lowest. Risk mitigation measures should be allocated to lower overall risk, producing a cost-benefit return-on-investment.
The threats that confront attorneys and judges in or outside their places of employment are dynamic. One or several of them might play out in a single incident. Again, these threats largely fall under the umbrella of customer-on-worker incidents, and the risks are present to attorneys and judges whether inside or outside of his or her place of business. Therefore, potential targets need to be aware that a malicious actor or group of actors might dox, SWAT, and send a hoax letter to their intended victim. Alternately, a national leader might mount a campaign of denunciation against a judge, inciting a follower to take direct violent action to harm the demonized target.
Above all other categories, the “wild card” type is the worst-case attack scenario and needs to be anticipated by the security agencies and executive protection firms contracted to safeguard potential victims. Such scenarios might include physical attacks against a target’s family and home, bombing a courthouse to prevent or delay a contentious trial, or other types of unanticipated threats.
Dr. Joshua Sinai is a professor of practice, intelligence and global security studies, at Capitol Technology University, in Laurel, Maryland. He is the author of Active Shooter: Handbook on Prevention.
