Man Charged With Making Hundreds Of Threats To Supreme Court Justices As Security Concerns Mount

Topline

An Alaskan man has been charged with making threats to kill or injure six sitting members of the Supreme Court and some of their families, amid a wider spike in threats to federal judges that led the United States Marshals Service to request nearly $40 million for increased security in its most recent budget proposal.

Key Facts

Panos Anastasiou, 76, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on nine counts of making threats against a federal judge and 13 counts of making threats in interstate commerce for messages sent through a public Supreme Court website between March and July of 2023.

The nearly 500 threats contained violent, racist and homophobic rhetoric alongside threats of assassination via torture, hanging and shooting, the indictment says, and encouraged others to participate in the acts of violence.

The messages were intended to intimidate the justices and “retaliate against them for official actions” they’d taken on the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said.

The threats were made against six members of the Supreme Court who are not named in the indictment, but the court is currently split 6 to 3 among justices who are Republican and Democratic appointees, respectively.

Each count of making threats against a federal judge could come with 10 years in prison if Anastasiou is convicted, and each count of making threats in interstate commerce comes with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Big Number

$38 million. That's how much additional money the United States Marshals Service asked for in its Fiscal Year 2025 budget request to pay for two new programs meant to beef up security for federal judges and justices on the supreme court. The department's budget has not yet been acted on.

Key Background

Threats made against federal and supreme court judges have been on the rise for the last decade. A report from Reuters earlier this year found that the annual average number of threats against judges rose from 1,180 incidents in the decade before 2015 to 3,810 in the seven years after. Marshals documented nearly 27,000 threatening and harassing communications targeting federal courts between fall of 2015 and fall of 2022, which the department said was unprecedented. From 2020 to 2023, serious threats against federal judges more than doubled from 220 to 457.

Tangent

In June, an armed man was arrested outside the Maryland home of Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh. Nicholas John Roske was charged with "attempts to kidnap or murder, or threats to assault, kidnap or murder" the justice. He told an emergency call taker he "came from California to kill a specific United States Supreme Court justice."

Further Reading