Judge in Bovino murder-plot case warned of threats to judges after family members were killed in 2005

The judge presiding over this week’s trial of a man accused in a murder plot against U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino became an advocate for increased judicial security after a litigant in 2005 murdered her mother and husband in a crime that shocked Chicago.

Threats against judges are disturbingly common in 2026. But after that harrowing experience 21 years ago, U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that the “fostering of disrespect for judges can only encourage those who are on the edge, or on the fringe, to exact revenge.”

Lefkow called on the committee to help sustain “a society based on the rule of law, instead of right being defined by might.”

The judge went on in later years to hand a 4 ½ year prison sentence to notorious Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge. Now, the 82-year-old Lefkow is set to preside over the first trial resulting from the deportation campaign in Chicago known as “Operation Midway Blitz.”

Juan Espinoza Martinez is accused of offering $10,000 for Bovino’s murder.

Lefkow is a Kansas native who graduated from Northwestern University's law school. She assumed senior status as a judge in 2012.

Two of Lefkow’s colleagues in Chicago — U.S. District Judges Sara Ellis and April Perry — have recently acknowledged threats and intimidation they’ve experienced while presiding over challenges to the Trump administration.

But the violence that prompted Lefkow’s testimony in the Senate came in February 2005, five years after President Bill Clinton nominated her to the bench. Lefkow found her mother, Donna Humphrey, and husband, Michael Lefkow, shot to death in her Edgewater basement.

The investigation led to a man Lefkow had ruled against in a civil rights lawsuit. He shot and killed himself days later after police stopped his van for having faulty brake lights in a suburb outside Milwaukee.

The man’s DNA matched a cigarette butt in a sink in the Lefkows’ home, and ammunition found in his home matched a bullet fired in the Lefkows’ basement. Authorities also found a note in which he admitted to the killings and listed judges who’d angered him.

Two of those judges had offices in Milwaukee.

In his note, which appeared nearly identical to one sent to WMAQ-Channel 5, the man wrote that he sneaked into the basement early in the day hoping to eventually encounter the judge, but when other family members discovered him he "had no choice."

Lefkow quietly returned to work at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in summer 2005, and a note appeared outside her courtroom asking parties not to mention the tragedy. She went on to preside over Burge’s perjury trial in 2010 and wound up giving a prison sentence to the man who’d become synonymous with Chicago police torture allegations.

Burge died in 2018. But during his 2011 sentencing, Lefkow told him that jurors didn’t believe the testimony he’d offered in his own defense.

“And I must agree,” she said, “that I did not either.”

Lefkow said she wished there was not “such a dismal failure of leadership in the department that it came to this.” She said “so much pain could have been avoided” if state or federal prosecutors had acted earlier.

And, in a move that surprised court observers, Lefkow brought up the murders of her family members. She told the courtroom she felt “deeply indebted to the valiant police officers” who tracked down the killer.

She explained that, “I am no stranger to violent crime.”

“Respect is hardly a sufficient word for how I feel about the talent and dedication of the people who helped me and my family in a time of crisis,” Lefkow said. “Yet, too many times, I have seen officers sit in the witness box to my right and give implausible testimony to defend themselves or a fellow officer against accusations of wrongdoing.

“Each time I see it, I feel pain,” she said, “because the office they hold has been diminished.”