The D.C. Council is considering giving local and federal judges the ability to request that information about them — including their home address, personal phone numbers and the names of family members — be removed from public and private databases, a step that advocates say is needed to ensure their security in an era of increasing threats to jurists.
The bill, introduced by council Chair Phil Mendelson, would cover Supreme Court justices; federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals, U.S. District Court and U.S. Bankruptcy Court; and judges in D.C. Superior Court and the D.C. Court of Appeals. It would prohibit individuals, the government and businesses from disclosing judges’ personal information if a request is made that it not be shared.
The legislation was drafted at the request of Judge Robert Wilkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who reached out to Mendelson in September 2024 to press the matter, indicating that he had been the victim of doxing. He noted that D.C. allows victims of domestic violence to shield their personal information, and asked that judges be offered the same opportunity.
“Unfortunately, there are people who want to use threats to intimidate judges, or even worse, to harm or kill judges as retribution for our rulings. Such actions are not just attacks on the individual judges, they are attacks on our system of justice and the rule of law itself,” Wilkins wrote in testimony submitted to the council ahead of a hearing Wednesday.
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Wilkins recounted a number of local cases of judges being threatened or killed, including Maryland Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson, who was shot and killed in 2023 by a man whose divorce proceedings he was overseeing. The killing spurred legislative action to protect judges’ privacy in Maryland; Mendelson’s bill is modeled after what Maryland lawmakers approved.
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Wilkins also cited threats faced by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and an incident this year at the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett where someone called 911 and falsely reported gunshots in hopes of provoking a large police response. Wilkins also said one of his own colleagues had been subject to dozens of unsolicited pizza deliveries in D.C.
“Officials with the U.S. Marshals Office tell me that there have been at least 64 recent incidents when a pizza was delivered to the home of one of our D.C. federal judges by a stranger, and many of those deliveries came with a message referencing Judge Esther Salas, a federal judge whose husband and son were shot at the front door of her New Jersey home in 2020, by a disgruntled litigant posing as a delivery man,” he wrote.
An August report from the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University law schools found that while criticism of the courts and individual judicial decisions are part and parcel of a democracy, intensifying political polarization has taken those disagreements to a more troubling level.
“Threats of violence, intimidation, and disinformation directed at judges, and defiance of court orders go beyond healthy criticism and fundamentally threaten judicial independence,” said the report. “Attacks of this nature are not new. But in recent years, the experience of federal judges and data indicate that the frequency and severity of such attacks have escalated significantly.”
Those sorts of attacks and threats can be distinctly present in D.C., Wilkins told Mendelson in his original letter in late 2024 requesting legislative action.
“We handle numerous cases of national interest and which spur heated controversy, including all of the criminal cases from the January 6, 2021 insurrection,” he wrote.
Congress adopted a federal law to better shield judges’ personal information in late 2022, and this summer Barrett and Justice Elena Kagan testified before Congress on the need for more security for judges. Still, Wilkins and other advocates say that state-level action is also necessary.
While the D.C. bill has support, the devil will be in the details. Local supporters of Mendelson’s bill say it will need to simplify the process for judges in D.C. to request that their personal information be removed from public and private databases.
“Suppose a judge buys a home, registers to vote, enrolls her children in public school, applies for a permit to build a fence around her home, and calls 311 to have the remains of her old fence picked up as bulk trash. That judge’s home address is now in the databases of at least six different D.C. agencies,” said Misty Thomas Zaleski of the Council for Court Excellence.
While the majority of the threats have been faced by federal judges, Doug Buchanan, a spokesperson for D.C.’s local courts, said it would similarly provide local judges “some added security barriers between the judiciary and those that they serve.”
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