Judges shouldn’t be attacked for making tough rulings

One was appointed by a Republican president, the other by a Democrat. Their legal philosophies may differ, but on this, they spoke as one.

Supreme Court police expect a 38% increase in threats this year, after last year’s 25% jump. “Those statistics sound abstract,” Barrett said, “but being on the receiving end of them is not.”

She would know. In May, a false report of gunfire sent police to her home; her teenage son opened the front door to leave with friends and found the street lined with cruisers. Earlier in her service, court security issued her a bulletproof vest. Barrett said she never expected this job would put her “in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”

Threats against jurists have skyrocketed

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

The job of a judge is to read the law and tell us what it means. Judges are supposed to be immune to political pressure. They are not immune to physical violence.

In 2020, a man who had built a detailed dossier on U.S. District Judge Esther Salas came to her New Jersey home to kill her and instead murdered her only son and gravely wounded her husband. Barrett testified that justices now receive anonymous packages sent in that boy’s name. “I think the message on these deliveries being sent in his name is clear,” she said.

In Fulton County, we know courtroom violence firsthand. A placard in the courthouse lobby memorializes the tragic events of March 11, 2005, when Brian Nichols, who was on trial for rape, overpowered a deputy, took her gun, and murdered Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, and Deputy Sgt. Hoyt Teasley. That night he killed a fourth victim, off-duty ICE agent David Wilhelm.

So, what is spurring the rapid rise of threats against our judiciary?

The U.S. Marshals Service says violence against judges once came mostly from people with a stake in a particular case — Nichols and Salas’s attacker both fit that description. But the marshals say far more threats now come from people enraged by politics. There have been 370 threats against federal judges since October, and Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2024 that threats have tripled in a decade. As partisan rhetoric intensified, the number of threats rose.

Courts should not be the targets of violence or politics

Four years ago, someone inside the Supreme Court leaked the draft Dobbs opinion — a breach without precedent in its modern history, and an assault on the confidentiality nine people need to reason through the hardest questions in American life. That summer, an armed intruder was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, motivated, prosecutors said, by that leaked ruling.

This is not a Republican or Democrat problem; it’s an American problem. The chairman of the July 14 hearing, a Republican, put it plainly: whatever you think of a given ruling, the people who issue our rulings must be safe.

He’s right — and the reason cuts to the heart of what a court is. In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous” branch, the one with “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” Courts command no army and control no purse. Their authority rests on the U.S. Constitution and on the shared belief that judges decide cases according to the law, not according to who’s cheering for it. Every effort to recast judges as partisan foot soldiers chips away at that fundamental belief. Once it’s gone, the judgment is worth nothing.

Which brings me home to Georgia.

Credit: Jason Getz/AJC

Credit: Jason Getz/AJC

This past May, two incumbent justices of our own Supreme Court, Charlie Bethel and Sarah Warren, faced serious challengers. By law, Georgia’s judicial elections are nonpartisan, and for good reason. A judge is not meant to represent a constituency or deliver a policy. A judge reads the law and applies it, even when — especially when — the outcome disappoints the voters who put them there.

That is not the race Democrats chose to run. The state party poured more money into judicial races than it had in 20 years; its chairman said openly it was “the first time we’ve gone on offense.” Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed the challengers — two left-leaning plaintiff attorneys who campaigned not on judicial temperament or fidelity to the law, but on hyperpartisan issues like abortion and voting rights. Ironically, outside groups supporting them spent heavily branding the incumbents “politicians in robes.”

Think about what that message signals to voters. It invites us to choose judges the way we choose legislators — by outcomes they promise. But a judge who campaigns on outcomes is not a judge at all, but rather a politician in a robe.

And this is not merely my opinion. Two days before the election, Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Commission, the state’s own judicial watchdog, found both challengers had violated the Code of Judicial Conduct: they promised in ads to restore abortion rights, and they endorsed each other. The code forbids both.

Federal District Court Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner (yes, Stacey Abrams’s sister) blocked the commission from publicizing its findings that close to the election, holding the timing could chill protected speech.

On appeal, an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel subsequently overturned the district court’s ruling, holding “the public will be harmed by not knowing about, and getting to evaluate for themselves, the credible allegations of misconduct.”

Disagree with a decision? Fine. Don’t attack the judge.

Let’s just make this easy: judges do not and should not promise outcomes.

Thankfully, Georgians made the right call, and both justices kept their seats. But the curtain has been pulled back, and one thing is clear. Georgia Democrats, including our incumbent U.S. senators, have no problem politicizing the courts; the role of judges is just another cog in the political wheel of power.

And there is a cost beyond who wins the election. When we recast a nonpartisan judicial race as a partisan brawl - with judges on one team or the other -, we raise the temperature around people who are already targets. You needn’t draw a straight line from one campaign ad to one threatening letter to see it: the hotter we make the fight over a court, the more dangerous we make it to sit on one.

None of this means judges are above scrutiny. They aren’t. We can debate their rulings, criticize their reasoning and vote in the elections the law provides. Civilized disagreement isn’t a threat to the court; it’s why it exists. But we have blurred the line between disagreeing with a judgment and attacking the judge, and that is simply un-American.

Remember why the Founding Fathers established an independent judiciary at all. Separating the courts from the passions of the moment was intentional — not to shield judges from accountability, but to shield the law from us on our worst days.

Argue hard about what the law is, then respect the answer even when you lose. Reject the “politicians in robes” framing wherever it appears, from either side. And extend to the men and women on the bench the security they need to do a job most of us wouldn’t want: telling the powerful, and sometimes the majority, no.

At the end of the day, I don’t want men and women on the bench wearing Kevlar. And I don’t want them wearing a red or blue jersey. The black robe should be respected enough to be enough.

Meagan Hanson is a conservative, attorney, political strategist and former Georgia state Representative from the Atlanta area. She is an AJC contributor.

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