A 77-year-old Alaska man who sent more than 500 messages through the Supreme Court's website, including calls to assassinate justices and a racial slur directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, has agreed to plead guilty to threatening six members of the nation's highest court and to illegally possessing a handgun as a convicted felon.
Panos Anastasiou is slated to appear for a change-of-plea hearing in federal court in Anchorage this week, Reuters reported. The plea deal will resolve charges first brought against him in 2024 in the case United States v. Anastasiou, No. 3:24-cr-00099, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska.
Prosecutors recommended probation with home confinement. Not prison. Not a federal facility. Home confinement, for a man who, over the course of more than a year, directed hundreds of violent threats at sitting Supreme Court justices and their families.
Prosecutors said the messages began in March 2023 and escalated sharply in January 2024 to signal Anastasiou's intent to threaten and retaliate against six justices. The plea agreement cites a message dated July 5, 2024, four days after the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority handed down a ruling granting President Donald Trump substantial criminal immunity for actions taken in office. Trump was at the time running for a return to the White House.
That message used a racist slur against Justice Thomas and called for the assassination of Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justice Samuel Alito. It also contained the following language, quoted in the plea agreement:
"Every American should volunteer to ASSASSINATE not just Trump but the 6 corrupt unelected scumbags and whoever stands in the way."
When Anastasiou was originally indicted, the charges painted an even broader picture. Fox News reported that the Department of Justice alleged he sent more than 465 threatening messages to justices and their family members through the Court's public website contact form. The indictment described violent, racist, and homophobic rhetoric coupled with threats of assassination, hanging, shootings, kidnapping, drowning, strangling, lynching, and beheading.
The Department of Justice indictment stated that "beginning on or about January 4, 2024, Anastasio began sending messages intended to threaten harm and convey threats of harm towards Supreme Court Justices [and their family members]." The messages, it continued, "contained violent, racist, and homophobic rhetoric coupled with threats of assassination via torture, hanging, and firearms, and encouraged others to participate in the acts of violence."
The original indictment carried serious weight. The Washington Times reported that Anastasiou faced more than 20 counts, including nine counts of making threats against a federal judge and 13 counts of making threats in interstate commerce. Each count carried a potential sentence of five to ten years if convicted.
Yet the plea agreement now on the table reduces all of that to a guilty plea on the threats charge and the felon-in-possession-of-a-handgun charge, with prosecutors recommending probation and home confinement rather than prison time.
Anastasiou's lawyer, Jane Imholte of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Alaska, did not respond to a request for comment. Andrea Steward of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Alaska is listed as counsel for the United States.
This case did not happen in a vacuum. The U.S. Marshals Service logged 564 threats against 396 federal judges nationally in the 2025 fiscal year. That figure captures only the threats deemed serious enough to record, the real volume of menacing communications directed at judges across the country is almost certainly higher.
The Washington Examiner noted that the Anastasiou case fits a pattern of escalating hostility toward the Supreme Court, referencing the earlier attempted assassination plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That 2022 incident, in which an armed man traveled to Kavanaugh's Maryland home before calling police on himself, was a stark reminder that threats against justices are not abstract. They carry operational risk.
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed the Anastasiou indictment directly when charges were first announced:
"We allege that the defendant made repeated, heinous threats to murder and torture Supreme Court justices and their families to retaliate against them for decisions he disagreed with."
Garland added that "our justice system depends on the ability of judges to make their decisions based on the law, and not on fear. Our democracy depends on the ability of public officials to do their jobs without fearing for their lives or the safety of their families."
Fine words. But the sentencing recommendation that followed those words tells a different story about how seriously the system treats these threats in practice.
The handling of Anastasiou after his arrest only deepens the concern. The New York Post reported that Anastasiou was released without bail. He then asked the court to let him have an internet-enabled cellphone again, arguing he needed it for home security monitoring and medical appointments while undergoing cancer care.
His defense attorney, Imholte, wrote that "Mr. Anastasiou lives alone in a high-crime neighborhood." Court papers from the case also included another alleged message in which Anastasiou reportedly wrote: "We should make [Supreme Court Justices 1-6] be AFRAID very AFRAID to leave their home and fear for their lives everyday."
So a man who allegedly told six justices they should fear for their lives every day was himself released to go home, and then petitioned for the return of the very type of device he had used to send hundreds of threats.
The timeline here matters. Anastasiou started sending messages in March 2023. Prosecutors say the threats escalated in January 2024. The Supreme Court's immunity ruling came down on July 1, 2024. Four days later, Anastasiou sent the message calling for assassinations and deploying a racial slur against Justice Thomas. Charges were brought in 2024. And now, in 2026, the resolution is a plea deal with a recommendation for home confinement.
That is more than a year of sustained, escalating threats against the highest-ranking judges in the country, threats that included calls for assassination, torture, and beheading, and the proposed consequence is that a 77-year-old convicted felon who illegally possessed a handgun stays in his own home.
Compare that to the rhetoric surrounding the case. Garland called the threats "heinous." The indictment ran to 22 counts. The statutory exposure was potentially decades in prison. The U.S. Marshals Service is tracking hundreds of threats against judges every year. And the system's answer is probation.
There are open questions the public record does not yet answer. Which six justices were targeted, beyond the three named in the July 5 message? What specific statutes anchor the plea? And why did prosecutors conclude that home confinement was an appropriate recommendation for conduct this sustained and this severe?
Every American who believes in the rule of law should be troubled by the gap between the gravity of these threats and the lightness of the proposed consequence. Supreme Court justices, whatever one thinks of their rulings, serve under the Constitution. Threatening to assassinate them is not political speech. It is a federal crime. And when the system treats it as something barely worth punishing, it sends a message of its own.
The message is not lost on the next person sitting at a keyboard, nursing a grievance, and weighing whether to type something vile into a government contact form. If 500 threats, a racial slur, calls for assassination, and illegal gun possession add up to home confinement, the deterrent effect is close to zero.
Accountability that arrives late and lands soft is not really accountability at all. It is a system going through the motions, and the people who pay the price are the judges, their families, and every citizen who depends on a judiciary that can do its job without looking over its shoulder.