The chief U.S. marshal for Northern Virginia, concerned about the killing of a federal judge's family members in Chicago, went to Richmond this month to review security measures for federal judges.
While there, John F. Clark heard about the latest incidence of mayhem: the killing of a judge and a court reporter in a courtroom in Atlanta on March 11. He vowed to redouble his efforts to protect Virginia judges.
"We're very, very concerned," said Clark, the Alexandria-based U.S. marshal for the Eastern District of Virginia. Clark said he believes judges are at greater risk than ever because of the types of cases they oversee, including those involving violent gangs and terrorism. "The courtroom is very much a high-risk environment," he said. "There is certainly potential for violence."
As judges in Virginia and Maryland struggled to absorb the news from Chicago and Atlanta, they said the killings reinforced the need for strict courthouse security. "This is a dangerous job in an increasingly dangerous society," said Richmond-based U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson, a former director of the U.S. Marshals Service and a former U.S. attorney in Alexandria.
"I think criminals today are far more brazen than they were 10 to 15 years ago," Hudson said.
At the same time, judges vowed that the violence would not deter them from dispensing justice. The Atlanta shootings came after a rape suspect overpowered a sheriff's deputy and used her gun to kill a judge, a court stenographer and a second sheriff's deputy who had chased the alleged assailant into the street, authorities said.
Those killings came 11 days after the husband and mother of U.S. District Judge Joan H. Lefkow were slain in their home. Chicago police say a disgruntled litigant, who later killed himself in a Milwaukee suburb, was responsible.
"You grieve in your heart over these tragedies, but the greatest tribute you can pay another judge is to continue conscientiously with the business of justice as usual," said J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a judge on the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
In Fairfax County's juvenile and domestic relations court, Judge Michael Valentine said the possibility of violence "is an occupational hazard."
Valentine ordered the use of hand-held metal detectors in 1986, a decade before standard metal detectors were installed in the larger circuit and district courthouses. Cases in his courthouse often involve domestic abuse, child abuse or just the gradual collapse of a relationship, "and those all generate a great deal of emotion," Valentine said.
Longtime Fairfax prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. said judges and others in the legal profession have come to accept threats as part of the job.
"I've got a guy who's been writing me letters for 20 years, telling me what he's going to do to my wife and kids," Horan said. "He sent them to the sentencing judge, too. The judge couldn't believe the letter he got." But the author was doing a 70-year sentence, Horan said, "and the decision was he wasn't getting out anytime soon."
In Baltimore, Maryland's most violent jurisdiction, some judges said that they were not surprised by the news from Atlanta.
"If these defendants didn't have impulse-control problems, they wouldn't be here," said Baltimore Circuit Court Judge John M. Glynn, who oversees the city's criminal docket. "They are here because they deal with their problems by lashing out, often with a gun."
