[asab]

I want judges to be safe. I also want to understand the motivations of this attacker. Their actions weren't justified, but having a long-running court case that can decide the course of your life can cause many new problems. What level of desperation would cause someone to lash out like this? There will always be unreasonable people, but I wonder if this outcome would have been different if courts did indeed process cases in a timely way. We know it is especially cruel to people who have nothing to defend themselves with.

[ilamont]

An openly misogynistic lawyer who is believed to have killed the son of a female federal judge in New Jersey had a list of more than a dozen other possible targets, including three other judges and two doctors, three people with knowledge of the matter said. ...

While his precise motive for making the list remains unclear, Mr. Den Hollander had received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and F.B.I. agents earlier this week were exploring whether that news set him off on a mission of revenge against those he believed were his enemies.

... Mr. Den Hollander described himself as an anti-feminist and had made a career out of filing lawsuits, some of them frivolous, alleging discrimination against men. He also published blog posts in 2006 arguing women were inferior to men and advocating physical violence against them. In one post, he said women should be strapped to missiles and dropped in the Middle East.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/nyregion/roy-den-hollande...

[titanomachy]

The article explains his motivations. Apparently he was driven by his ideology rather than personal desperation. From the article:

Roy Den Hollander, a New York lawyer who had filed a suit against the male-only military draft, harbored deadly grudges. On July 11, 2020, he killed a lawyer in California. Eight days later, he came to our door and killed Daniel. Too late, I learned that he had often described himself as “anti-feminist.” In a self-published memoir, he described me as “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama.”

[johnbcoughlin]

The murderer was a lawyer who had appeared in her court, not a defendant.