Amy Coney Barrett lamented that being a judge isn’t the D-list celebrity gig it used to be. Her cursing the limelight likely has to do with the poor media coverage she’s gotten for not knowing the First Amendment and being a partisan hack, but scrutiny comes with being a public servant. You do things people don’t like and criticism is likely to follow. Hell, most judges have their emails online at this point. Even you could reach out! Email once, that’s fine. Email twice, that’s okay. Email 400 times and you should expect some sort of legal action, Jonathan. From Bloomberg Law:
A Los Angeles man is accused of emailing hundreds of threatening messages to New Jersey judges and other officials, one including a picture of a shotgun with a winking emoticon.
Jonathan Lipman was indicted Monday in the United States District Court for the Central District of California for allegedly harassing and threatening Garden State judges in an effort to get back at a legal system that imposed a protective order against him after he made threats on Facebook. He’s accused of violating 18 U.S.C. § 875 (c), a federal provision criminalizing threats over interstate communication.
This guy needs better friends! Somebody in his circle, lawyer or not, should have advised him that threatening judges should not be high on the priority list after getting in trouble for threatening people on Facebook. Also, can we talk logistics here? What’s the point of threatening someone with a gun when you’re literally across the country? It’s clown shoes. You’d have had a better chance of making good on that threat by hooking up a bluetooth device to one of these:
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every time i pick up my guns i switch my my duck hunt gun controller pic.twitter.com/Q5b7V4Tari
— darmarr1 (@darmarr2) July 31, 2020
Sending the picture of the gun was the best he could do because his actual guns got taken away from him:
Lipman first got into hot water when he posted allegedly threatening comments on the Lacey Township, NJ police department’s Facebook page, which led to a municipal judge issuing an extreme risk protection order blocking Lipman from possessing firearms.
The Los Angeles Police Department fulfilled that order, executing a warrant at Lipman’s home. This triggered months of harassing emails that landed Lipman in federal court.
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Talk about trigger fingers becoming Twitter fingers! Or email, rather. If you wanna do a better job of striking fear into others, hop off the keyboard and start decorating the outside of your house — Halloween is coming up. Speaking of which, you better be preparing for the competition! Those emails will contain content that we, students, and maybe even some judges would actually like to see.
Hundreds of Emailed Threats to NJ Judges Draw Federal Indictment [Bloomberg Law]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.