Soon after sentencing began Tuesday for a north suburban man who threatened two federal judges with letters containing pictures of bullets, it became clear that U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis would not spare him from prison.
She told James Lebuhn that it’s one thing for an individual to take on the risk and obligation of becoming a judge. It’s another to have to “look your kid in the eye” and say “your home is not safe.”
So while Lebuhn insisted he’d made a one-time mistake, Ellis said she had “to think about the people that are sitting in front of their computer who are angry and frustrated and feel like they don’t have a voice, and they feel like the world is going in a direction they don’t agree with.”
Then she gave Lebuhn six months in prison, reminding the 66-year-old Libertyville man that “if we allow folks to just do what they want and threaten people in order to get the outcome that they want, that will ruin democracy faster really than anything we can do.”
The sentencing comes as concern continues to rise about threats to judges, with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett testifying just weeks ago about having to explain to her 12-year-old son why she’d come home with a bullet-proof vest.
Lebuhn pleaded guilty in March to sending threatening letters on March 24, 2025, admitting he’d also sent them to employees of the Office of Personnel Management in Washington, D.C. The judges Lebuhn threatened were based in Amarillo, Texas and Fort Pierce, Florida.
The only judges sitting in those cities are U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida, who were both appointed by President Donald Trump. Cannon presided over Trump’s criminal case involving classified documents.
Lebuhn sent both judges a letter that read, “the citizens do not like what you are doing to our democracy. They know who you are.” Below those words were pictures of two bullets, followed by the warning, “be careful. The level of anger is rising.”
One of the threatened judges listened remotely to Tuesday’s sentencing, Ellis said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Rothblatt told Ellis that threats like Lebuhn’s “have impact on real people in their day-to-day life” and “can’t be countenanced by the judicial system or the government writ large.”
Later, Lebuhn told Ellis, “I feel very ashamed about what I’ve done.” His attorney, Steve Dollear, wrote in a court filing that Lebuhn “broke under personal and family stress and acted out” by making the threats in what was “the lowest moment in his life.”
Dollear said Lebuhn lost his job as a financial analyst and wound up taking a job as a bus driver. He confessed in separate interviews with the Federal Protective Service, the U.S. Marshal Service and U.S. Postal Service, and the U.S. Secret Service, the attorney wrote.
Dollear sought a sentence of probation during Tuesday’s hearing. But Ellis told him, “in a case like this involving threats to government employees and officials … you have an uphill battle to convince me that probation is appropriate.”
The government employees threatened by Lebuhn weren’t entitled to the same level of protection given to judges, Ellis noted. So for them, “this was an even more frightening experience,” she said.
“They can’t turn to the Secret Service or the Marshals Service for protection,” Ellis said. “They just have to hope against hope that they’ll be safe at work. Or safe at home.”
Security concerns prevent U.S. District Court officials from discussing specific threats faced by judges in Chicago, court spokesman Sean Lewis told the Sun-Times.
“The fair administration of justice, the rule of law and the safety and security of our judges and entire court family are among our highest priorities,” he said.
Still, individual judges have not been shy about the threats they’ve faced. U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman said she’d been “called almost every kind of name in the book” as she sentenced a man to more than three years in prison this month for threatening Trump and others.
The 2005 murder of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow’s mother and husband by a man Lefkow had ruled against remains fresh in the minds of many at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
Ellis also presided last fall over a high-profile legal challenge to Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in Chicago. During one hearing in the case, she said, “I can’t tell you how many judges have received death threats.”
“It’s unfortunately part of the cost of doing business as a public servant in the government,” Ellis said then. “That, unfortunately, society has devolved to the point where anyone who disagrees with how you do your job is subjected to threats.”
Ellis and Coleman were both appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama. A colleague of theirs, U.S. District Judge April Perry, also acknowledged receiving threats last fall. They came as Perry, appointed by President Joe Biden, grappled with whether to block Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops into Illinois. She eventually did so.
But before she ruled, she told a Trump administration lawyer, “I agree with you about the seriousness of threats generally across the United States right now.
“I don’t think there is a single public servant, really, who is not being subjected to threats,” Perry told him.
“Mine started about 10 minutes after I got this case.”