Chicago murders spotlight risks to judges

But it's not always enough. In recent decades three federal judges have been killed:

• In 1979, US District Judge John Wood was murdered by a hired killer allegedly connected to a Colombian drug-smuggling case the judge was trying.

• In 1988, US District Judge Richard Daronco was shot in his backyard by the father of a plaintiff in a dismissed sexual-discrimination case.

• And in 1989 Federal Appeals Court Judge Robert Vance was killed by a mail bomb. In that case, a civil rights attorney was also killed, and the whole circuit was put under protection, says Turk.

Judges around the country were shaken by the Lefkow killings. The risks of their job are "something you have to be constantly aware of," says North Carolina State Court of Appeals Judge Sanford Steelman. "You do have to take certain steps to protect your family and yourself. At the same time ... federal courts have a lot more security for their judges than do state courts."

When Judge Steelman was a Superior Court Judge in Davidson County, N.C., a defendant once threw a chair at him after the judge revoked his probation. In another instance, an inmate was raving in a jail cell, threatening the lives of the judge and district attorney.

"If there's any possibility of violence, you implement necessary measures to make sure security is there," says Steelman.

In addition to highlighting the judiciary's security risks, the Lefkow case is bringing renewed attention to white-supremacy groups. The crime comes at a potentially dangerous time for hate groups, says criminologist Brian Levin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino

"Most of the old guard that helped found the neo-Nazi movement in the United States are either dead or incapacitated," says Mr. Levin. This includes Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations and William Pierce of the National Alliance. Others, such as Ku Klux Klansman Lewis Beam and Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance have seen their influence wane, in many cases because victims have filed successful lawsuits.

At the same time, notes Levin, there is a core of true believers inspired by calls for a violent "leadership resistance." So while the movement may have contracted with the removal of its traditional leaders (as well as with internal squabbling over who would succeed them), it was also those leaders who often acted as a check on violent behavior. "What we have now is a core of people who are unrestrained," says Levin.

Other experts agree.

"The ideology of hardcore white supremacists today is a desperate, defensive ideology, one dominated by the Fourteen Words slogan: 'We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,' " says Mark Pitcavage, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, via e-mail. "They have convinced themselves that now ... the white race is threatened."

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the World Church of the Creator (now called the Creativity Movement) considers itself a religion based on the belief that the white race is "nature's highest creation."

Hale sympathizers claim in hate literature and on websites that Judge Lefkow is Jewish. She is not, and her husband was active in the Episcopal Church.

For now, until it can be determined how or if the killings relate to her job as a judge, Lefkow and her family are once again under 24-hour protection.

• Patrik Jonsson contributed to this report from Raleigh, N.C.

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