Op-Ed: Courthouse Violence: Making Sense of a Senseless Tragedy

As human beings, our natural reaction to a senseless tragedy is often to seek broader meaning. The internal engine of hope that propels many of us through life compels us to rationalize the loss by praying that it will benefit society as a whole. For me, courthouse shootings in Atlanta earlier this month, which resulted in the deaths of Judge Rowland Barnes, Fulton County court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, sheriff’s Deputy Hoyt Teasley and federal agent David Wilhelm, are precisely such an occasion.

I do not live in Atlanta and I have never known any of the victims, but I join them in mourning their loss. As servants of the court, these were people who devoted their days to maintaining the vast machine of justice, greasing its wheels to ensure that everyone who comes before it gets a fair shake.

Indeed, lawyers around the country are sharing in this trauma as surely as they would if they practiced in that very courthouse. Every day, we go about our business just as these four people did that fateful morning. We spend our days working in courtrooms, interacting with court employees, practicing before judges, swaying jurors, and discussing the proceedings with court reporters. We too are protected by the people charged with securing those hallowed grounds.

When someone attacks one of these guardians of justice, we feel it as sharply as anyone else, outside of an individual victim’s family. So, in response to this great loss, I feel the need to seek some greater meaning. My hope is that our nation will respond to this tragedy by doing everything possible to preserve safe access to our courts.

A fundamental tenet of our democracy is that justice must be done in full view of the public. For this to happen, litigants must be able to trust that the courts are safe when they bring their legal issues to court, jurors considering their cases need to feel secure, and the public must be able to trust that the outcomes of court proceedings are fair. If we cannot protect the participants in the process, this vital principle is dangerously undermined.

Inadequate courthouse security also threatens another key principle of our justice system, the independence of our judiciary. For more than 200 years, this has been a fundamental element of our society. But independence is impossible without security. We need to assure adequate resources for security in and around our courthouses, evaluate the security needs of judges away from the courthouses, and restrict access to sensitive information that might expose them or their family members to harm so that judges can operate in an environment free from fear and intimidation.

Finally, we cannot ignore the bigger picture. While it bears scant relation to the specific circumstances of this case, it would be a mistake to look at this incident – and the similar tragedy a few days earlier in which the family of federal judge in Chicago was murdered -outside of the broader context in which the courts operate.

Recent years have seen a sharp decline in civility in public discourse about the role of the courts and more broadly in respect for our courts. We see it in congressional attempts to remove certain issues from the jurisdiction of courts, in the increasingly bitter partisanship over nominations to the federal bench, in the vitriolic rants on allegedly “activist” judges that flood our nation’s airwaves almost every day, and in the increasing intensity and personalization of judicial elections in many states.

In some respects, this poisonous atmosphere can be as dangerous a weapon against an independent judiciary as is any individual assailant. It alters the public’s perception of judges and the justice system until finally the judiciary is neither understood nor respected. The time has come to tone down these attacks on judges and the courts.

If we do all this, the senseless loss of life in Atlanta will not have been in vain.