Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT
U.S. federal judges have begun breaking their silence on death threats and intimidation that they say have been exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s rhetorical attacks on judges who rule against his policies.
A panel of judges and lawyers from all over the country gathered on July 31 via zoom at the Speak Up for Justice event to speak candidly about their experiences with receiving threats.
More than 400 threats against judges have been recorded since the beginning of the year. Some of those threats include explicit voicemails calling for the assination of judges and judges’ home addresses being leaked online.
One of the trends is called “pizza doxing.” It involves delivering pizzas to judges’ homes under the name of Daniel Anderl – the 20-year-old son of U.S. District Court Judge of New Jersey Esther Salas. A disgruntled lawyer murdered Anderl in a targeted attack on July 19, 2020.
“When a judge receives that pizza … that tells the judge the people that want to find you know where to find you,” Salas told ICT. “Then these pizzas started going to their kids’ homes so that tells the judge not only can we find you Mr. Judge, Mrs. Judge, but we know where your kids live.”
“Two of my adult kids received pizzas they did not order and I received one in my home in Seattle all in the name of Daniel,” said Robert Lasnik, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Robert Miller is a professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and is the chief justice for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe Court of Appeals. He said the increase of death threats and intimidation is a nonpartisan issue.
“We just decide the cases that come before us. We rely on the law and the facts,” Miller told ICT after the July 31 panel event. “For one branch to attack the other branch for doing their job or for the public to get so inflamed and even threaten the decision-maker, well, that’s just un-American and dangerous to our democracy.”
Historically, judges have always faced public scrutiny. In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared state-sponsored segregation in public school unconstitutional, a campaign arose to impeach Earl Warren, who delivered the majority opinion.
But according to Paul Kiesel, a trial lawyer and founder of the Speak Up for Justice event where the July 31 panel was held, divisive political rhetoric from national leaders over the last six months has increased the threat level.
“Rather than going through the process of appealing and challenging as is our system of justice, we have taken to raising the threat level to judges themselves merely because we disagree with the decisions that they’ve reached,” Kiesel told ICT. “And those threats have included death threats, they’ve included intimidation, they’ve included social media doxing, they’ve included swatting.”
“We’re seeing the spreading of disinformation by our political leaders on down and that’s telling the American public that the justice system is broken,” Salas said. “Telling them it doesn’t work, judges are rogue, judges are corrupt, judges are crazy, unconstitutional judges, judges are deranged, judges are idiots. That’s the latest insult. Judges are idiots.”
Judge John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington was “swatted” – a term referring to someone giving a false tip to local law enforcement – prompting police to show up to his house armed and ready.
The “swat attack” followed Coughenour’s ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s order attempting to end birthright citizenship.
“I signed up for this and I’ll endure the threats and attempt to intimidate but my family didn’t,” Coughenour said.
Earlier this year, Trump called for the impeachment of Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, calling him a “radical left lunatic,” after Boasberg blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador.
“If you look around the world, the rise to power in 1930s Germany, 1970s Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Soviet Union, was all preceded by an attack upon the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary,” said Coughenour. “Looking back at what happened in Germany, my good friend Judge Lasnik said, ‘Where were the judges? Where were the lawyers?’ We need a call to action in this country from our lawyers and our judges to say, ‘Not in our country, not on our watch.’”