“The threats are horrifying. The vulnerability of those targeted is stunning. And the system that’s supposed to protect them is inadequate. The US Marshals Service, which is tasked with keeping federal judges safe, can’t fully assess the security risks they face because their tracking system doesn’t allow officers to cross-reference behavioral information and spot suspicious activity that could connect cases, according to interviews with three former marshals who regularly worked with the database. The system was built to keep tabs on prisoners and fugitive investigations, not to track threats and inappropriate communications against the judiciary. The Secret Service knows more about a potential school shooter than the Marshals Service knows about the type of person that stalks and threatens a judge, said John Muffler, who retired in 2015 as a chief inspector with the Marshals Service. “There’s way more meaning in the data being collected than just a number and I think that’s the big miss,” he said. The Marshals Service has been working to transition its entire agency over to a new operating system that would help investigators in the Judicial Security Division input data in a uniform way and quickly pull out specific information. But competing priorities and limited funding have kept the Marshals Service from being able to complete that work, former marshals said.Judicial security has become a rising concern among judges themselves. In November, the Justice Department announced it had indicted two people for allegedly threatening to kill federal district court judges in the Northern District of Texas. The number of substantiated threats against federal judges climbed in recent years from 178 in 2019 to 311 in 2022, according to data obtained from the Marshals Service through a Freedom of Information Act request. In the first three months of 2023 there were more than 280 threats. The number of threats and inappropriate communications against all judiciary employees, however, dropped slightly last year. It’s unclear how many judicial threats are prosecuted. The FBI referred an inquiry to the Marshals Service, which said it doesn’t track that information. Bloomberg Law identified at least 57 people who have been federally prosecuted for threatening a federal judge or federal courthouse from 2013 through August of this year. The cases were compiled from court records as well as incidents tracked by Peter Simi, who’s studying threats to public officials at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha. The prosecutions that Bloomberg Law identified are a small sample of the thousands of threats tracked by the Marshals Service. Taken together, the cases illustrate how horrifying the threats are. Some of the language in the graphic that follows is quite explicit. The Marshals Service has a full portfolio of responsibilities, ranging from apprehending fugitives to protecting witnesses. The agency is also tasked with keeping more than 2,700 federal judges and magistrate judges safe, along with investigating and tracking threats against 30,300 federal prosecutors and court employees, as well as protecting the courthouses themselves. Bloomberg Law tried repeatedly to talk with the Marshals Service about its tracking system and its judicial security work. A spokesman for the Marshals Service said “no one has volunteered to participate” after a reporter followed up on a request to speak with an official for this story. The agency didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment sent via email with specific questions about the agency’s tracking of judicial threats. In an email after publication, a Marshals Service official wrote that while the agency does not “discuss our specific security programs, we continuously review security measures that protect the judiciary and take appropriate action to provide additional protection when it is warranted.” Timothy Corrigan, a judge on the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, knows firsthand what it’s like to have his life threatened.”
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