When lawyers and judges become targets

ST. GEORGE — Threats and harassment made against the lives of attorneys and judges might be more common than one would think. Utah attorney Stephen Kelson said during a presentation to his legal peers that "it's not talked about enough."

In 1927, Utah Judge Tillman Davis Johnson was shot three times while on the bench by a widow unhappy with the settlement and dismissal of her husband's wrongful death case. Though injured, he survived.

The last time an attorney was killed in the state was in 1985, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was slipped a gun by his girlfriend in an attempt to flee. Shooting a guard to escape, Gardner then ran to the courthouse archives office, where attorney Michael Burdell was. Gardner fatally shot Burdell.

"Since that time, the Utah legal community hasn't suffered a direct tragedy like these," Kelson said during the Friday presentation at the Utah State Bar 2026 Spring Convention in St. George. "However, it doesn't make the Utah legal community immune from national trends."

Have threats of violence increased over the years?

His interest in threats against the legal community began when he was a law student at Brigham Young University. Kelson told the Deseret News that when discussing research paper options, a professor mentioned that no one had written on the topic. So Kelson did.

As a new attorney in Davis County, Kelson said he approached the Utah State Bar in 2006 about conducting a survey because "all these news agencies were saying violence against attorneys is increasing, but there was no survey that said so. There was nowhere that they were backing up the information."

The 2006 survey resulted in 904 responses out of the 6,832 state bar members:

• 417 threats/violence
• 63 physical assaults
• Over 300 examples of threats and violence

Two years ago, Kelson approached the bar once more to study how the statistics had changed since the first statewide survey. In 2026, there are currently 12,847 licensed attorneys — nearly doubled from 2006 — and 1,593 responded to the survey:

• 703 threats/violence
• 58 physical assaults
• Over 600 examples of threats and violence

Since the 2006 survey, Kelson has reached out to other states across the country where similar — or at times even more severe — results have been found.

The findings also discovered that male attorneys experience higher amounts of threats, but the threats were different from those experienced by their female counterparts, who experienced threats that were more sexual in nature.

Kelson told the Deseret News that he tries to avoid concluding that society is simply becoming more violent over time. Rather, he looks at the reality of the situation: People in litigation who find themselves on the losing side of a ruling often want to blame someone else.

The survey also found that attorneys who experience the greatest amount of threats and assaults were in family law, criminal prosecution and criminal defense.

In these kinds of cases, "you're dealing with individuals that are in high stress and you're dealing with life, liberty, property, you're dealing with family, you're dealing with money, and you're also dealing with people which may already be highly emotional and perhaps even violent," Kelson explained, "and when they're in that kind of state, there's a chance they're going to act out against someone, and then you have an attorney step in."

Threats against yourself are one thing; against your family is another

During the presentation on Friday, many hands were raised when every attorney who had been threatened was asked to do so.

Kelson shared responses from the survey that included stalking, threatening to kill the attorney and their children, cutting the brake lines on an attorney's bike, emailing photos of dead or mutilated bodies to threaten the attorney that they were next, and even sending the address of an attorney's child's school to threaten violence to their child there.

Stewart Ralphs, director of Legal Aid Society of Salt Lake, which works with victims of domestic violence, was one of many who kept their hand raised when asked who in the crowd had been physically assaulted.

He told the Deseret News he's been physically threatened twice and physically assaulted once. A woman tried to harm him when he told her they couldn't provide her legal services. "She tried to stab me with her pen," he said, "and I actually kept the tie that she hit but it didn't pierce my skin."

Jess Couser, who manages a family law firm in Salt Lake City, told the Deseret News she's had opposing parties wish harm on her children, post pictures online of her children, and had her client be told that the judges and attorneys in the case were going to be killed.

When asked if it ever gets too much to handle or if she has regrets in her choice of profession, Couser said no.

"Certainly, there are times when I worry more, like for my children or my spouse, who didn't choose this themselves. But no, usually the ability to make change and have an impact certainly overrides some of the negative."

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