Before he even donned his robe on Friday, Fulton County Judge Rowland Barnes voiced worries about the recalcitrant defendant in his court.

To start what quickly became one of the darkest days in the history of the US judiciary, the defendant - a former college-football linebacker named Brian Nichols - made good on his vow not to take a verdict in his rape case "lying down." News reports cite the following chain of events: Mr. Nichols, who was not handcuffed, overwhelmed a deputy sheriff escorting him to court and stole her gun. He then ran into the 8th Floor Atlanta courtroom, where he shot and killed Judge Rowland and court reporter Julie Brandau. Outside, he killed a sheriff's deputy, then beat a journalist in the parking garage and demanded his car. For 26 tense hours, Nichols was on the run, but on Saturday he peacefully surrendered after the city's largest-ever manhunt.

Coming only 11 days after the shooting deaths of a federal judge's husband and mother, apparently by a disgruntled plaintiff in Chicago, the Fulton County Courthouse murders underscore growing worries about the protection of America's justice system. The circumstances around the Atlanta killings - taken in the context of some 700 reported threats against US judges each year - raise a host of questions about everything from the influx of mentally troubled people into the justice system to the way guns are handled by deputies.

Yet there's also concern about going too far: Some wonder if these attacks on the judiciary, and the intense courthouse fortification that could follow, might turn halls of justice into fortresses, and judges into robed "ghosts" of the public square.

"We have federal judges telling us that security outside their courthouses is insufficient and county and state judges telling us that security inside the courthouse is insufficient," says Allan Sobel, director of the American Judicature Society in Des Moines, Iowa. "The question is whether we turn courthouses into armed camps and isolate them even more from the public."

These breaches of the bench are causing security reviews in courthouses across the country. From King County in Washington State to Leake County in Mississippi, judges are reexamining safety procedures and regulations - and finding many of them gathering dust. Adding to the challenge, security standards differ dramatically from courthouse to courthouse, from circuit to circuit.

In Cincinnati, a judge raised concerns last week about the practice of letting certain people into the courthouse without sending them through the metal detector. In Lufkin, Texas, a secretary for a local lawyer and former judge was blunt with her opinion on safety at the local courthouse: "Protection? What protection?"

In Wapello County, Iowa, a county supervisor finds that security measures installed in 2001 are already being overlooked - and that panic buttons haven't been tested in three years. And in Mississippi, there's a renewed call for stricter security, including installing cameras aimed at judges' parking spaces.

Many courthouses, especially federal ones after the Oklahoma City bombing, are as tough to get into as Fort Knox. The new federal courthouse in Seattle, which opened last year, is part of a wave of courthouse fortification: Its bullet-proof benches are shielded with Kevlar.

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