The threats are horrifying. The vulnerability of those targeted is stunning. And the system that’s supposed to protect them is inadequate.
The US Marshals Service, which is tasked with keeping federal judges safe, can’t fully assess the security risks they face because their tracking system doesn’t allow officers to cross-reference behavioral information and spot suspicious activity that could connect cases, according to interviews with three former marshals who regularly worked with the database.
The system was built to keep tabs on prisoners and fugitive investigations, not to track threats and inappropriate communications against the judiciary.
The Secret Service knows more about a potential school shooter than the Marshals Service knows about the type of person that stalks and threatens a judge, said John Muffler, who retired in 2015 as a chief inspector with the Marshals Service.
“There’s way more meaning in the data being collected than just a number and I think that’s the big miss,” he said.
The Marshals Service has been working to transition its entire agency over to a new operating system that would help investigators in the Judicial Security Division input data in a uniform way and quickly pull out specific information. But competing priorities and limited funding have kept the Marshals Service from being able to complete that work, former marshals said.
Judicial security has become a rising concern among judges themselves. In November, the Justice Department announced it had indicted two people for allegedly threatening to kill federal district court judges in the Northern District of Texas.
The number of substantiated threats against federal judges climbed in recent years from 178 in 2019 to 311 in 2022, according to data obtained from the Marshals Service through a Freedom of Information Act request. In the first three months of 2023 there were more than 280 threats. The number of threats and inappropriate communications against all judiciary employees, however, dropped slightly last year.
It’s unclear how many judicial threats are prosecuted. The FBI referred an inquiry to the Marshals Service, which said it doesn’t track that information.
Bloomberg Law identified at least 57 people who have been federally prosecuted for threatening a federal judge or federal courthouse from 2013 through August of this year. The cases were compiled from court records as well as incidents tracked by Peter Simi, who’s studying threats to public officials at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha. The prosecutions that Bloomberg Law identified are a small sample of the thousands of threats tracked by the Marshals Service.
Taken together, the cases illustrate how horrifying the threats are. Some of the language in the graphic that follows is quite explicit.
The Marshals Service has a full portfolio of responsibilities, ranging from apprehending fugitives to protecting witnesses. The agency is also tasked with keeping more than 2,700 federal judges and magistrate judges safe, along with investigating and tracking threats against 30,300 federal prosecutors and court employees, as well as protecting the courthouses themselves.
Bloomberg Law tried repeatedly to talk with the Marshals Service about its tracking system and its judicial security work. A spokesman for the Marshals Service said “no one has volunteered to participate” after a reporter followed up on a request to speak with an official for this story. The agency didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment sent via email with specific questions about the agency’s tracking of judicial threats.
In an email after publication, a Marshals Service official wrote that while the agency does not “discuss our specific security programs, we continuously review security measures that protect the judiciary and take appropriate action to provide additional protection when it is warranted.”
Hunters and Howlers
Timothy Corrigan, a judge on the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, knows firsthand what it’s like to have his life threatened.
He was in his recliner in his Florida living room watching an episode of the police drama “The Closer” with his wife late on a Saturday night in June 2013 when Aaron Richardson crept into his neighbor’s yard with a high-powered, big game hunting rifle, hid in a hedge adjoining his property, and took aim at his window.
The explosion was “one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard,” Corrigan, who is now chief judge of the Middle District, said.
“I remember looking up at the light next to me to see if it had exploded,” he said. “My wife, who was much more savvy than I was, yelled, ‘Tim. It’s a gun. Get down!’”
The bullet missed Corrigan’s head by 1.6 inches.
Richardson, who slipped away from the scene, was what marshals refer to as a “hunter,” someone who attacks a judge. People who repeatedly threaten judges without ever acting are known as “howlers.” Former marshals say they’re rarely one in the same but there’s no way to tell until a threat is investigated.
Corrigan was asked to make a list of potential suspects after the attack and Richardson was only added because there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest for violating the terms of his supervised release.
“He was just one of thousands of people in my judicial career I had sentenced,” Corrigan said. “I didn’t even remember him very well.”
Timothy Corrigan is pictured in his chambers in 2023, a decade after the shooting. Photographer: Agnes Lopez/Bloomberg
Even if a howler never turns into a hunter, their threats can have devastating consequences.
“It’s not tenable for a democracy to have people expressing their grievances and lacing that discontent with threats of violence at this volume,” said Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University. It suggests “a certain lawlessness is acceptable and is becoming normalized,” he said.
Simi found that people who threaten public officials, including judges, often have a criminal history, mental health issues, or are motivated by ideology. “We are finding that right-wing extremist ideologies tend to be the most prominently represented,” which includes white supremacy and anti-government sentiments more broadly, he said.
Former President Donald Trump has played an outsized role in normalizing and encouraging these threats, Simi said.
Trump repeatedly called out judges on social media for rulings he disagreed with, including Judge James Robart of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, in 2017. Robart received over 1,100 serious threats, including over 100 death threats after suspending Trump’s first travel ban, according to the summer 2023 issue of the American Bar Association’s Judges’ Journal. Trump called Robart a “so-called judge” on Twitter after the ruling.
Through a law clerk, Robart said he had “no comment” when contacted for this story.
More recently, threats were directed at the federal district court judge assigned to the criminal case in Washington, D.C. in which Trump is charged with allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.
A Texas woman is now facing federal charges for calling Judge Tanya Chutkan’s chambers in August and left a message laden with racial slurs threatening to kill anyone who goes after Trump.
But threats also come from people on the other side of the political line.
A California man is facing attempted murder charges after going to US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home last year armed with a handgun. He allegedly told detectives he planned to kill the justice because he was upset about the leak of the court’s draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion and a recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, according to an affidavit from an FBI agent filed in the case.
Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district court judge in Texas, said he got a barrage of death threats and harassing phone calls in March ahead of a hearing over whether to restrict a key abortion drug called mifepristone.
A woman was charged in October for calling a judge’s chambers in Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk is the only sitting judge, at the time of the abortion pill case. The name of the target wasn’t identified in the indictment.
Read More from Retired US District Judge Paul Grimm: Boosting Public Trust in Courts Needed to Fight Threats to Judges
Simi focused his research on people who were federally charged with publicly communicating a threat to a public official. The Marshals Service doesn’t track these convictions or maintain a list of reoffenders.
The federal cases Bloomberg Law and Simi identified showed the people prosecuted often had a legal case before the judge they threatened or felt strongly about a case the judge was hearing.
In October, Maryland Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson was fatally shot in the driveway of his home. The prime suspect, who was found dead a week later, was a man who had lost custody of his children in a divorce hearing before Wilkinson the same day he was shot.
While the Marshals Service tracks threats against federal judges, there is no national repository for threats against the 30,000 state court judges. States either don’t collect this data, don’t collect it consistently across states, or don’t report it publicly, William Raftery, a senior analyst at the National Center for State Courts, said in an email.
Though judges take an oath to be fair and impartial, Simi said there’s still the potential for threats to influence their decisions on the bench.
“We are all human and people are impacted by these extra-legal factors,” he said.
Corrigan, who survived the shooting at his home, has gotten more recent threats. In 2018, a state inmate sent him a threatening letter after the judge rejected his 2011 petition challenging his incarceration.
In the letter, the man told Corrigan he was going to find “willing souls who will kill you.”
“You ruined my life. So your life must be taken,” said the letter signed, “Sincerely Nothing to lose.”
The hardest part, Corrigan said, has been the impact the threats have had on his wife and kids.
“To think because of what you decided to do for a career that now you endangered your family, that’s a hard thing to think about,” he said.
“We can’t have a functioning system of justice if judges are in fear for their lives and their family’s lives for just doing their jobs,” he said.
The state inmate was sentenced to 10 years in prison in May 2021 for threatening Corrigan.
Better Tracking
Former marshals say the agency needs better analytical tools.
The Marshals Service has been working to transition all of its departments from the Justice Detainee Information System, or JDIS to a new system called Capture.
A four-page spreadsheet the Marshals Service provided in response to a FOIA request shows there’s no uniformity in how the data collected on individual threats is being entered now. While some lines signify the judge threatened is from a particular court, there are multiple lines that appear to account for threats against someone with the same title.
There are separate lines, for example, titled “MAG JUDGE,” “MAGISTRATE COURT JUDGE,” “MAGISTRATE JUDGE,” and “MAGISTRATE JUDGE FED.”
The Judicial Security Division was slated to be the last department within the agency to make the transition because it was going to have the most information to move over, said Jon Trainum, former chief of the division’s Office of Protective Operations, who retired in December 2021.
Capture was expected to give the marshals a way to break data down into more detail, including by district, judge, the person who made the threat, and how the threat was communicated.
“We would have threateners who would threaten someone in southern New York, eastern Arkansas, middle Florida, northern Texas and with the new system it would be able to follow that stuff and provide prompts when someone was entering a case to show those similarities,” Trainum said.
For example, if a red Corvette is seen circling the federal courthouse in Omaha, Neb. on Wednesday and then a red Corvette is spotted circling a federal courthouse in Little Rock, Ark., on Friday “intelligence analysts need to be able to connect those dots pretty quickly,” said John Bolen, who served as an assistant director responsible for judicial security before retiring in 2019.
Funding issues, however, have contributed to the project’s delay.
Knowing they wouldn’t have all the money for the project up front, Bolen said, required the Marshals Service to prioritize which phase of Capture would come first. Attempting a multi-year project of this magnitude within the framework of the traditional federal budget cycle is very difficult to execute, he said.
That’s because funding for the Marshals Service comes from separate congressional appropriations for the judiciary and the Justice Department.
The Marshals Service said in its fiscal 2018 budget request that it needed to retire JDIS, and that the development of Capture was expected to take four years and cost approximately $107 million.
“The current configuration and support for JDIS lack stability, scalability, centralization, and are no longer technologically sustainable,” the agency said, adding that the system “does not easily interface with external local, state, and federal partners for complex data sharing.”
In an email response to questions, the Administrative Office of the US Courts said it has provided $10 million in funding for Capture over a number of years, but that money was “in support of the security management portfolio, which includes court security staffing, security projects and other judicial facility security requirements.” It was not money that went to update the marshals system for tracking threats against the judiciary.
The Marshals Service got $3.85 billion in direct appropriations for fiscal 2023, which is less than the $3.96 billion requested from Congress. It’s unclear how much went to Capture. For fiscal 2024, the Justice Department has asked for $4.07 billion for the Marshals Service.
The AO, which serves as the secretary to the Judicial Conference that’s the policy making body of the US courts, said it had no comment when asked if it’s concerned about JDIS’ limited capabilities.
The Judicial Conference, however, has expressed “deep concern” about the proposed funding levels for the judiciary. In letters sent to the House and Senate Appropriations Committee leadership in July, the Judicial Conference said limiting court security to the Senate bill’s $750.2 million would force the Marshals Service to defer some security system and equipment improvements.
Things like “upgrades to courthouse access systems, security screening and x-ray equipment, and replacement of outdated courthouse video security systems,” would be put on hold at a time when the Judicial Branch is working to enhance courthouse security in response to growing threats, the conference secretary Judge Roslynn Mauskopf and budget committee chair Judge Amy St. Eve said.
Despite the limitations in their data analysis, former marshals and the judges they protect praised the marshals for the good work they do and spoke of how judicial security is a difficult job even with the best analytical tools.
“When we’re in the courthouse we’re in a place where they can protect us pretty well, but they can’t have 24-hour guards on judges’ at their homes, as they go to movies, and go shopping, and go to dinner, and stuff like that,” said Patrick Schiltz, chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Minnesota.
In today’s world anyone can go online and get a judge’s personal information, he said and “there’s nothing the marshals can do about that.”
Easy Access
Judge Esther Salas was in the basem*nt of her New Jersey home on the afternoon of July 19, 2020, when a gunman posing as a FedEx delivery driver murdered her 20-year-old son Daniel and nearly killed her husband Mark in the foyer of their center hall colonial.
In briefings with police after the attack, Salas, a judge on the US District Court for New Jersey, learned she had been the real target. Salas said police found a dossier about her that belonged to their prime suspect — an anti-feminist lawyer they found dead a day later from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“He knew my routes to work, the schools Daniel attended, lists of Daniel’s baseball games, information about Mark’s law office, and he even knew what parish we belonged to,” she said, while speaking at a circuit court conference in Minnesota in July.
Reporters gather outside of Judge Esther Salas’s New Jersey home in 2020 after the shooting. Photographer: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Salas said police also found a similar file on Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
In memory of her son, Salas lobbied Congress to pass the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act in 2022 to make judges’ personal identifiable information harder to find online.
In the email response to questions, AO spokesman Charles Hall said the judiciary hired a vendor that worked with third-party data brokers to remove 3 million individual pieces of judges’ personal information online after the law passed last year.
Nearly 1,635 active judges, as well as six retired judges and 72 family members, have enrolled in the judiciary’s reduction and redaction training program that the law created as of Dec. 1, Hall said.
In training judges on security as an adjunct professor at the National Judicial College, Muffler tells judges to be an active participant in their own survival. The former marshal advises them to get a home security system, be mindful of social media posts, protect their private information, pay attention to their surroundings, trust their intuition, and take all threats seriously.
“Don’t wait for the person with the badge and the gun to be doing their job,” he said.
(Updated to include a statement from the US Marshals Service)
— With assistance from Olivia Cohen.
Federal Court case data from cases where federal judges have been threatened was compiled by Lydia Wheeler and Olivia Cohen, with additional case data provided by Peter Simi of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha from his examination of threats to public officials. Data visualization and development by Atthar Mirza.
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Updated to include a statement from the US Marshals Service.
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