Judicial independence is under grave threat on several fronts, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote on Tuesday in an unusually urgent and somber year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary.
“Violence, intimidation and defiance directed at judges because of their work undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” he wrote.
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.
“Unfortunately, not all actors engage in ‘informed criticism’ or anything remotely resembling it,” he wrote. “I feel compelled to address four areas of illegitimate activity that, in my view, do threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends.”
One, he wrote, was “violence directed at judges for doing their jobs.” 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.”
At a judicial conference in September, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she had been given one, prompting questions from her 13-year-old son.
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, leading to “angry, profane phone calls” and “visits to the judge’s home, whether by a group of protesters or, worse, an unstable individual carrying a cache of weapons.”
After the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established a constitutional right to abortion, there were protests at the houses of justices in the majority, and an armed man was arrested near the home of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The man, Nicholas John Roske, was charged with attempted murder and has pleaded not guilty.
Politicians bore some blame, the chief justice wrote.
“Public officials, too, regrettably 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,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, adding: “Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others.”
The chief justice did not name names, although he has singled out public officials on a couple of occasions. In 2018, for instance, he issued a statement rebuking President Donald J. Trump for calling a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy “an Obama judge.”
The chief justice said at the time that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” adding: “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
In 2020, Chief Justice Roberts denounced remarks by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, a Democrat, who had castigated two of Mr. Trump’s appointees, Justices Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch, at a rally outside the court. “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Mr. Schumer said. “You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Chief Justice Roberts responded at the time: “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.”
A third threat to judicial independence, he wrote on Tuesday, was disinformation about the work of the courts amplified by social media. Some of it, he said, was the product of “a new and growing concern from abroad.”
“In recent years, hostile foreign state actors have accelerated their efforts to attack all branches of our government, including the judiciary,” the chief justice wrote. “In some instances, these outside agents feed false information into the marketplace of ideas. For example, bots distort judicial decisions, using fake or exaggerated narratives to foment discord within our democracy.
“In other cases, hackers steal information — often confidential and highly sensitive — for nefarious purposes, sometimes for private benefit and other times for the use of state actors themselves. Either way, because these actors distort our judicial system in ways that compromise the public’s confidence in our processes and outcomes, we must as a nation publicize the risks and take all appropriate measures to stop them.”
The court will hear arguments next week on the constitutionality of a law that could effectively ban TikTok based on fears that its Chinese parent may use it to spread covert disinformation or to retrieve sensitive information about American users.
Chief Justice Roberts noted a fourth concern: the possibility that the courts’ rulings will be disobeyed.
“It is not in the nature of judicial work to make everyone happy,” he wrote. “Most cases have a winner and a loser.
“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed.”
That is not a given, Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “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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