Chief justice Roberts warns intimidation and violence risk judicial independence

Violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to disobey lawful court rulings are putting the United States’s revered principle of judicial independence in jeopardy, the chief justice of the US supreme court, John Roberts, has warned.

In a sobering end of year report, Roberts – seen as the leading rightwinger on the court’s current six-to-three pro-conservative majority – laments a litany of threats contemporary judges face in America’s increasingly polarised political climate, which he says are putting the rule of law at risk.

“There is of course no place for violence directed at judges for doing their job,” Roberts wrote, explaining that he feels “compelled to address four areas of illegitimate activity that … do threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends”.

The four are violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy the law.

Citing statistics from the US marshals service, Roberts said threats and hostile communications against judges had tripled in the past decade, with more than 1,000 serious threats against federal judges recorded in the past five years alone. Several had resulted in full round-the-clock security details being assigned to judges, while in extreme cases, some judges have been given bullet proof vests for public events.

“In 2005 and 2020, close relatives of federal judges were shot to death by assailants intent on harming the judges who had handled their cases,” the chief justice wrote. “More recently, in 2022 and 2023, state judges in Wisconsin and Maryland were murdered, also at their homes. Each instance constituted a targeted attack following an adverse ruling issued by the judge exercising ordinary judicial duties.”

Roberts also decried the recent online practice of doxxing, involving the release of private information such as home addresses and phone numbers. These incidents have led to angry phone calls to judges or even visits to their homes by disgruntled litigants, or on occasion by “an unstable individual carrying a cache of weapon”.

That description appeared to reference an episode when an armed man was arrested near the home of Brett Kavanaugh, a fellow supreme court justice, following the 2022 ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. The man, Nicholas John Roske, was charged with attempted murder and pleaded not guilty.

Roberts also warned of the dangers of political interference, taking issue with “public officials [who] … have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges – for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.”

Although he did not name names, the remarks could be viewed as an implicit criticism of Donald Trump, who has assailed the integrity of various judges who have presided over multiple criminal and civil cases against him.

In 2018, Roberts rebuked Trump after the then president referred to a judge who ruled against his administration’s asylum policy as “an Obama judge”.

In 2020, Roberts condemned Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, for issuing a veiled warning against Kavanaugh and another supreme court justice, Neil Gorsuch, in a demonstration outside the court against some of its rulings.

“You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer said.

“Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous,” Roberts responded at the time.

The report follows polls showing public confidence in the supreme court and the judicial system generally at record lows following a series of contentious rulings and ethics controversies surrounding several justices, including Clarence Thomas.

Roberts omitted mentioning these issues in his report and was criticised by Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland who will take over as the party’s ranking member of the House of Representatives judiciary committee when the new Congress is sworn in next week.

“The chief justice does not discuss the elephant in the courtroom, which is the profound ethics crisis which has undermined the standing of the court across the country,” Raskin told the Wall Street Journal.

Referring to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol – which he played a lead role in investigating as a member of a congressional select committee – Raskin added: “I like the rhetoric of enforcing the rule of law against violence, intimidation and disinformation, but the supreme court completely let us down in a series of cases related to the defense of the rule of law against those forces.”