A Florida man pleaded guilty on Friday to threatening to kill a U.S. Supreme Court justice in a voicemail message he left with the court this summer.
Neal Brij Sidhwaney, 43, of Ferdinand Beach pleaded guilty on Friday in a Florida federal court to communicating an interstate threat to kill. According to a DOJ press statement released on Monday, Mr. Sidhwaney made a phone call from Florida to the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington on July 31 of this year, in which he left an “expletive-laden” message where he identified himself by name and repeatedly communicated threats to kill “a specific Supreme Court Justice.”
Prosecutors had not directly stated the intended target of Mr. Sidhwaney’s voicemail message in charging documents. Chief Justice John Roberts was instead identified as the intended target through a court-ordered psychological evaluation of Mr. Sidhwaney’s competency to stand trial.
According to the psychologist who conducted this competency evaluation, Mr. Sidhwaney may suffer from delusional disorder, schizophrenia spectrum, and other psychotic disorders. Mr. Sidhwaney had no history of alcohol or drug abuse and the psychologist determined that despite his apparent mental illness, he is “very intelligent.”
Mr. Sidhwaney had worked at Google for eight years and had won multiple company awards for his performance, but his paranoia began after leaving the company in 2017 and moving back in with his parents, the competency assessment states. Mr. Sidhwaney’s mother had said her son believed Google had planted chips inside his head and foot. Mr. Sidhwaney allegedly also believed he was being followed, first by Google, then the FBI, and more recently by the U.S. Secret Service, and had been afraid to leave the house.
Mr. Sidhwaney’s mother said he son would often become enraged from watching the news and would write letters and emails or make phone calls. Mr. Sidhwaney told the psychologist that he started off complaining to officials at the local level, but that his complaints eventually rose to the state and then federal levels of government. Court records provided little additional context as to why Mr. Sidhwaney eventually directed death threats at Chief Justice Roberts.
With his guilty plea and acceptance of the charge of communicating an interstate threat to kill, Mr. Sidhwaney faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Judge Marcia Morales Howard, the judge for Florida’s Middle Federal District Court presiding over the case, has not yet scheduled a sentencing date for Mr. Sidhwaney.
Threats Against Other SCOTUS Justices
The threatening July phone call directed at Chief Justice Roberts is not the first threat against Supreme Court justices in the past year.
In June, Nicholas John Roske was arrested near the home of conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. According to charging documents, Mr. Roske had called police on himself and was found near the justice’s home in possession of an assortment of weapons and tools, including a knife, Glock 17 pistol, hammer, and crow bar.
Upon his arrest, Mr. Roske told authorities he was upset by the leak of a draft of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, handing back to the states the power to regulate abortion. Mr. Roske told investigators he also suspected Justice Kavanaugh would also soon side with a decision to loosen gun restrictions. Mr. Roske has since pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder in the case.
According to an FBI affidavit in support of a subsequent search warrant, investigators found multiple conversations from online accounts they believed belonged to Mr. Roske. In one conversation on the Discord social messaging platform, Mr. Roske allegedly discussed killing not just one, but multiple Supreme Court Justices, writing “I could get at least one, which would change the votes for decades to come, and I am shooting for 3.”
Mr. Roske’s arrest coincided with widespread protests outside the homes of multiple conservative Supreme Court justices following the leak of the draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson.
Last December, President Joe Biden enacted the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act to help protect judges and their families. The law was named after the son of federal Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey, who was killed by an assailant in 2020 when he answered the door to his mother’s home.
The FBI identified as Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and men’s rights activist who’d challenged the constitutionality of the male-only U.S. military draft. Mr. Den Hollander was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound a day after the attack at Judge Salas’s home. In a February 2021 interview with 60 Minutes, Judge Salas said investigators had found evidence in a locker that Mr. Den Hollander used, that indicated he’d also sought to target U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal justice on the court.