Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito denounced that the leaked draft of his opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade made conservative justices "targets for assassination."
Justice Alito authored the majority opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson, which returned authority over abortion regulations to the states. He criticized the leak at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation Tuesday:
The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling (...) targets for assassination because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.
🚨 Justice Alito on the SCOTUS leak 🚨
"The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe... targets for assassination."
Watch the full clip 👇👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/g0VVVSQdTPA
- Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) October 26, 2022
The Supreme Court justice recalled that after the draft was leaked, a man was accused of trying to kill Judge Brett Kavanaugh. "It’s a pending case, so I won’t say anything more about that," Alito noted.
Climate of distrust in the Supreme Court
In any case, Samuel Alito considered that the leak "was a grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock because nothing like that had happened in the past, so it certainly changed the atmosphere at the court for the remainder of last term." He said that the court is trying to move on: "But that was last term, now we are in a new term."
Chief Justice John Roberts announced in May that the Supreme Court had launched an investigation into the leak.
