An angry trend: Threats against federal judges set record pace

WASHINGTON -- Threats against federal judges are on a record-setting pace this year, nearly 18 months after the family of a federal judge was killed in Chicago.

US Marshals, who protect the nation's 2,200 federal judges, believe they averted another potential tragedy in the Midwest last year when they helped block the release of a prison inmate who told a judge in a series of sexually charged letters that he was going to take her away.

Threats and inappropriate communications have quadrupled in 10 years . There were 201 reported incidents in the 1996 government spending year and 943 in the year that ended Sept. 30, the Marshals Service said.

This year alone, the Marshals Service has had 822 reports of inappropriate communications and threats, a pace that would top 1,000 for the year.

A threat typically includes a direct reference to harm, a weapon, or a violent act. Inappropriate communications range from rambling letters to accusations of bias to envelopes that contain feces.

Marshals say a portion of the increase can be attributed to a heightened focus by judges and their staffs since February 2005, when unemployed electrician Bart Ross broke into the home of US District Judge Joan Lefkow and shot to death her husband and mother.

Another judge had received, but not opened, a dozen letters from a particular inmate over a period of more than six months, said Michael Prout, chief inspector of the marshal s' protective security division until last August. Spurred by the Lefkow killings, the judge sent the unopened letters to the Marshals Service last year.

``The inmate had fixated on this judge and claimed her as his bride and described bizarre sex acts he was going to perform on her when he came to take her away," said Prout, now the chief deputy marshal in Chicago.

The inmate's release date was three to four months away when the letters came to the attention of marshals, Prout said. He would not identify the judge or the city in which she serves.

But the marshals say there was a steady upward trend of angry, inappropriate comments long before the shootings.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed in February that she and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate ``patriotic" killing of the justices.

The rise in civil lawsuits, especially those filed by people who do not have lawyers, and a change in criminal cases in federal courts help explain the increase , the m arshals say.

Donald Donovan, chief deputy marshal in Baltimore, said people who file and lose multiple lawsuits account for the largest percentage of threats.

Federal courts now handle many more violent crime prosecutions, cases that were once the province of state and local courts .

``There is rarely a trial now that does not have defendants eligible for the death penalty," Donovan said.