In his year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts decried violence, intimidation and disinformation and warned against defiance of court rulings, The New York Times reports. The report, which arrived in the wake of questions about the court’s ethical standards and a drop in its approval ratings, said some criticism of judges’ work is healthy, warranted and welcome. In the report, he addressed, four “areas of illegitimate activity” that threaten the independence of judges. At the top of the list was violence toward judges. The number of hostile threats and communication directed at judges has more than tripled in the past decade, he wrote. “In extreme cases,” he added, “judicial officers have been issued bulletproof vests for public events.” Until 1979, the chief justice wrote, only one federal judicial officer had been killed, in an incident unrelated to his judicial work. There have been a half-dozen killings of judges or their relatives in response to court rulings since then, he wrote.
The chief justice also decried the release on the internet of judges’ home addresses and phone numbers. Public officials have inflamed the issue by suggesting, for example, “political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote. A third threat to judicial independence, he wrote on Tuesday, was disinformation about the work of the courts amplified by social media. Chief Justice Roberts noted a fourth concern: the possibility that the courts’ rulings will be disobeyed. “Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings,” he wrote. “These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
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