Tag: courthouse security

Portland’s federal courthouse attacked again

The Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, which sustained significant damage in last summer’s Antifa riots, was attacked again over the weekend — just three days after federal officials removed the non-scalable fencing that had surrounded the courthouse since August. (The fencing has since returned.)

As shown in the video directly below, vandals broke courthouse windows and covered the building with obscene graffiti.

 

The Oregonian has a powerful article chronicling the damage, not only the the physical building but also to the public psyche.

Among the graffiti left on the front of the courthouse was a message that said in red, “NAZI’S WORK HERE.”

“As a first generation American whose parents lived through the horrors of World War II, in England and in Norway, you can’t say anything more offensive than alleging that the people who work inside that building, who I know and love, are Nazis,” Acting U.S. Attorney Scott Asphaug said Sunday.

“That building represents justice,” he said. “This is where people come to have their civil rights heard.”

The staff, attorneys and judges have continued to conduct courthouse operations throughout the past year’s mass protests, and will continue to do so undeterred, Asphaug said. Asphaug said he supports the rights of people to protest and make their voices heard but doesn’t support riotous behavior and the damage to the courthouse.

“The people who work in that building are a lot stronger than graffiti and broken windows,” he said, “and they’ll continue to do the important work they do.”

Anerican institutions may be imperfect, but they are grounded in time-honored truths about the value of liberty, opportunity, and equality. Their assailants, by contrast, are little more than common thugs and intellectual frauds.

Another federal courthouse attacked by a mob

Violent Antifa mobs in Seattle and Portland attacked a number of government buildings on Inauguration Day, including the William Kenzo Nakamura Courthouse in downtown Seattle.

(Photo from Seattle Police Twitter feed.)

Seattle’s roving band of thugs are no doubt wholly ignorant of William Kenzo Nakamura, an American hero who lost his life fighting for the 42d Regimental Combat Team in Italy in World War II. He was hailed for his extraordinary bravery, and posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and, later, the Medal of Honor.

These domestic terrorists also set fires and damaged private businesses. Make no mistake: they are as dangerous and evil as the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol earlier this month.

When similar riots engulfed the Pacific Northwest last summer — disrupting businesses, injuring innocent bystanders, and destroying Portland’s federal courthouse — state and local officials only made excuses for the violence. Will these cowardly politicians finally stand up for the citizens they took an oath to protect? Will the Biden Administration work to assure the safety of the federal employees who work in the courthouse and the members of the public who enter it?

The destruction at Portland’s federal courthouse

Sixty-one days of unbridled Antifa thuggery has destroyed the entire front of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. Graphic video from the local news below.

Disgusting and appalling.

The intricacies of courthouse design

Law360 has a very interesting article about the design of courthouses, a task which must balance a number of overlapping and occasionally competing goals:

  • Conveying respect for the rule of law and the courthouse as the physical “home of the law” (reminiscent of Chief Justice Taft’s moniker of the Supreme Court building as the “Temple of Justice”);
  • Assuring access to justice for court users and observers;
  • Providing adequate working space for judges and court staff; and
  • Protecting the safety of everyone in the building.

The modern courthouse is simultaneously an office building, a processing station, a public space, a secular temple, a democratic icon, an entertainment complex, and a playing field. Capturing all of those needs in one building is a profound architectural challenge.

Some of the newer courthouses were designed with extra space and wiggle room to accommodate changing needs. I especially like the design of the federal courthouse in Boston (below), notwithstanding its questionable interior artwork. But older courthouses are increasingly bursting at the seams or in need of major retrofitting, and the funding may not be available.

Moakley courthouse

Interested readers should check out the wonderful, and coffee table-worthy, Representing Justice by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, which tracks the history of American courthouses and the evolving goals behind their design.

Iowa courthouse break-ins were arranged by … the Iowa courts?

“This has been quite an odd case,” said one state senator.

Last month, two men were arrested for breaking into the courthouse in Dallas County, Iowa. The same men were charged with burglarizing the Polk County courthouse around the same time. Now it has come to light that they were hired by the state court administration in order to test courthouse security.

The men apparently broke into the Polk County courthouse after hours on one occasion, then had to break back in after they realized they had left some things behind. They were not caught until the third break-in in Dallas County. Last week, Iowa Chief Justice Mark Cady admitted that they had been hired by the court system itself, which had proceeded without notifying law enforcement or any other governmental branch.

Chief Justice Cady apologized for the snafu, and stated that the court system and the security company had “differences in interpretations” of the security company’s contract.

On federal laws and state courthouses

By now,  many readers may be familiar with the growing tensions between states and the federal government over the Trump Administration policy of arresting illegal immigrants outside (and inside) state courthouses. The issue has been brewing for some time, and came to a head in Massachusetts this week when a state court judge and court officer were themselves arrested by federal authorities for helping Jose Medina-Perez, an illegal immigrant in their courtroom on drug charges, evade imminent arrest by an ICE agent by spiriting him out the back door of the courthouse.

Yesterday, in what they maintain is merely a coincidence of timing, two Massachusetts District Attorneys filed a lawsuit against the federal government, seeking to enjoin ICE from making any further arrests in state courthouses.

My former law school classmate Ted Folkman has an excellent rundown of the events and a sensible take on it at Letters Blogatory.  He writes:

My best understanding of the law is that the immigration agent had the right to seek to detain Medina-Perez in the courtroom and that the judge probably shouldn’t have put obstacles (or perhaps “obstructions”) in his way, though I do not want to offer an opinion about whether the judge’s conduct satisfies the elements of the criminal statutes without studying them. Again, we want to think back to another era and the contexts in which states sought to thwart federal law enforcement, and not make a legal rule based just on the sympathies of the moment. But that said, I also think it’s a terrible idea to send immigration agents to courthouses in the first place to arrest people, because it discourages people from attending court and is contrary to efforts to increase access to justice. And I find it hard to see why the federal government thinks the answer is to charge the judge criminally rather than for the Massachusetts court to exercise self-governance.

Two points here deserve elaboration. First, the federal policy is a terrible thing for the operation of state courts and their users. It represents a clear intrusion by a separate sovereign that threatens to disrupt state court proceedings. More importantly, the fear of arrest by ICE agents is sure to dissuade people from coming to court when it is necessary that they do so. The administration of justice will suffer as victims and key witnesses don’t show up for hearings and trials. Claims of domestic violence, child custody, landlord-tenant relations, personal injuries, and a variety of other issues either will not be brought at all, or will lead to default judgments when the defendants fail to appear. If the American tradition of due process means anything, it is that even those who are not citizens — even those who are not here legally — deserve a fair day in court.

At the same time, state courts and state judges are simply not free to ignore federal law and policy with which they disagree. American history is rife with examples of states unacceptably undermining federal law through the operation of their own court systems. Again, if due process means anything, it is that the law must be fairly applied in every venue, regardless of (as Ted puts it) “the sympathies of the moment.” And the charges against the Massachusetts judge, if proven, are quite damning: she allegedly closed her courtroom to the ICE agent, turned off the electronic recording system, and snuck a federal fugitive out the back door of the courthouse. Regardless of how you come down on the morality of her action, her alleged behavior was remarkably unjudicial.

Put differently — we have courts of law, not courts of justice. There are established procedures in place to stop harmful conduct. The lawsuit discussed above is one such procedure; taking the law into your own hands while wearing the robe is not. Whether or not one sympathizes with the intent of the state judge here, her alleged activities have surely damaged the integrity of the state judiciary.

 

Are more judges arming themselves in self-defense?

This story out of Toledo suggests that the answer is yes.

This trend is not entirely surprising, given the high-profile, violent attacks on judges in recent months. But it’s not at all clear whether–and how–concealed carry by judges would affect the regular work of courthouse security staff.

An interesting, and somewhat sad, development.

Convicted war criminal commits suicide in open court

Late last month, Slobodan Praljak arrived in court at the Hague to hear the final outcome of his appeal. It was not what he had hoped for. Praljak, convicted in 2013 of war crimes stemming from his role in the civil war in Bosnia, learned that his conviction and sentence would stand.

As the judgment was read, and with cameras rolling, Praljak produced a small vial of liquid and drank it in full view of the judges.  He then announced, “I just drank poison.  I am not a war criminal.  I oppose this conviction.”  The hearing was immediately postponed and Praljak was rushed to the hospital.  He died shortly thereafter.

Dutch police and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are now investigating how Praljak smuggled the poison into the courtroom.  The New York Times reports on that question, as well as Praljak’s odd behavior in the days leading up to the hearing:

Defense lawyers at the tribunal say the security arrangements in place for defendants like Mr. Praljak, and the five other men whose sentences were affirmed on Wednesday, were rigorous. They were subjected to body searches when they left their detention center — inside a high-security Dutch prison — and again when they arrived at the tribunal building. But, lawyers acknowledged, body-cavity searches were not part of the routine. And in the months before his final appearance in court, he had seemed to eschew contact with his family and his lawyers.

Nika Pinter, his lead counsel, said in a telephone interview from Zagreb, the Croatian capital, that Mr. Praljak had told his family not to be present at the judgment.

Prajlak had been sentenced to 20 years in prison, and would have been eligible for parole in just two years (accounting for time served).  Perhaps this event will reinforce the need for courthouse security to protect the parties as much as the judges and court staff.