Judges in the US are facing an increasing number of threats of violence, intimidation, and disinformation, as well as officials defying court decisions, Chief Justice John Roberts has said.
“There is of course no place for violence directed at judges for doing their job. Yet, in recent years, there has been a significant uptick in identified threats at all levels of the judiciary. According to United States Marshals Service statistics, the volume of hostile threats and communications directed at judges has more than tripled over the past decade,” Roberts said in his end-of-the-year report, released on Tuesday.
In the past five years alone, there have been over 1,000 investigations into threats that required an assignment of a full-time security detail for judges, the report added.
“The final threat to judicial independence is defiance of judgments lawfully entered by courts of competent jurisdiction… But judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees,” Roberts said without clarifying which branches or officials attempted to undermine legal rulings but said that they claimed that the courts’ decisions were politically motivated.
Violence is not the only threat faced by US judges, as some court critics use what Roberts called “doxing,” which is making public otherwise private information such as a judge’s phone number or home address, which, in turn, can lead to “a flood of angry, profane phone calls to the judge’s office or home.”
