In killings' wake, urgency to protect courts

In contrast, many state and county courthouses, like Fulton County's, are seen as undermanned and overburdened, hot and crowded, with hundreds of cases adjudicated daily.

For those situations, says Robert Siciliano, a security expert in Boston, safety is all about specifics and vigilance.

The day before the Atlanta shootings, the judge and prosecutors in the Nichols case had asked for extra security after investigators found homemade knives in each of the defendant's shoes.

Now, officials are trying to understand why, even given those concerns, Nichols was guarded by a lone woman officer, many years his senior and far smaller.

Already, experts are pointing to trimmed budgets and undermanned courtrooms as part of the problem. Moreover, a study last year by the Justice Department found that US Marshals weren't meeting their own standards for following up on threats to judges.

"Lack of resources are a huge part of this," says Mr. Siciliano. "I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more."

Despite worries in Chicago about a larger white-supremacist conspiracy against Judge Joan Lefkow, the murders of her husband and mother seem instead to have been orchestrated by a troubled plaintiff in a medical malpractice lawsuit.

In Atlanta, a man with a troubled past and little to lose took the ultimate chance to get even with an arbiter of his future.

To some experts, the two incidents show not only a growing willingness of defendants to threaten and challenge the judiciary, but clear opportunities to strike.

"It's amazing how people in the legal system are like an open book. Anyone can pretty much get to them," says Siciliano. "Even celebrities in the limelight are stalked, but they're not making decisions for people's lives. Judges have higher profiles and are much more important to society than any celebrity."

Still, a lockdown of the nation's courthouses may not solve everything. Even small changes and technological advances could help bridge security gaps. For example, while Nichols's hands were free so as not to prejudice the jury in his case, a new "shockbelt" could have been worn underneath his clothes, says Richard Soloway, a national security expert in Amityville, N.Y. Tasers may eventually replace guns for deputies immediately involved with inmates. On Friday, the American Bar Association called for making judges exempt from having personal information published - a measure that some say would protect their out-of-robe identities, but which critics say would turn them into quasi-citizens, or "ghosts."

In the aftermath of the Atlanta violence, security experts have worried about how a failure to protect judges could turn an independent judiciary into an intimidated one, which many say would constitute a direct threat to the republic. Indeed, concerns about over-insulating the judiciary from society are now giving way to finding pragmatic ways to protect America's dark-robed arbiters.

"There's a randomness about it that is terrifying, but we have to keep in mind that [courthouse violence] is still very rare, and, for the most part, our justice system operates day in and day out without major tragedies." says Mr. Sobel. "Still, having two incidents so close together, it's not as easy to write them off as freak incidents."

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