We are, without a doubt, in the midst of a veritable plague of looming dangers aimed squarely at the judiciary. Not only did an armed man attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home in 2022 following a leak of the Dobbs decision, hostile threats directed at judges have more than tripled over the past decade, according to Chief Justice Roberts’s 2024 year-end report. Citing statistics from the US Marshals Service, the report said that in the past five years alone, more than 1,000 serious threats were investigated, and dozens of people were charged with crimes. In 2020, the US Marshals said it responded to over 4,000 threats or inappropriate communications against federal judges. In that same year, a disgruntled lawyer murdered US District Judge Esther Salas’s son and wounded her husband after gaining access to their home by posing as a delivery person. According to NBC News, in 2025, there were 103 unordered pizza deliveries to judges who had ruled against the Trump administration or spoke out about threats against the judiciary, and 20 were sent in Salas’s name.
As novelists, for decades, we have all explored themes of corruption, influence peddling, and pressure and threats against public servants in our fiction.
In Scott’s latest novel, Presumed Guilty, about a murder trial in a rural area in the upper Midwest, the longtime prosecutor, Hiram Jackdorp, and the trial judge, Wendy Carrington, have a contentious relationship. Jackdorp forced her out of his office when she was a young prosecutor, and later unsuccessfully attempted to prevent her election to the bench. But there is no moment during the trial when the novel’s narrator, the defense lawyer Rusty Sabich, sees Judge Carrington’s rulings as based on anything but a fair application of legal principles. She is a good judge whose fidelity to the rule of law prevents her from using her position for personal revenge.
