Jury trial begins for man accused of threatening to ‘skin’ California federal judge

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — In 11 emails sent in 44 minutes to the Northern District of California federal court email system on September 2, 2025, the sender said things like “I want you to visualize skinning U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer” and “California courts are valid military targets. California judges are enemy combatants.”According to U.S. Assistant Attorney Kent Stejskal in opening statements Tuesday, David Brooks Pokorny, a 45-year-old from El Cerrito, California, made the threats to assault, kidnap or murder Breyer. Pokorny is charged with felony threats against a judicial officer, with a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison.Stejskal showed the 14-person jury snippets from the emails accusing among other things, that Breyer, a Bill Clinton appointee, “turned trigger.” One email said, “I’m going to kill a hostage because you aren’t responding to terrorism."“Words within those 11 emails constitute what are called true threats,” said Stejskal.Whether or not Pokorny’s emails are true threats is one of the legal questions the jury will need to decide in order to reach a verdict. A true threat includes “serious expression conveying that the speaker means to commit an act of unlawful violence.”In his opening statement, Pokorny’s public defender John Reichmuth said that for the jury to find Pokorny guilty the prosecution must prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Pokorny meant the actions he wrote.“Because of the very high bar of the right to free speech, a reasonable person would not take them to be a true threat,” he said.He called Pokorny’s words “truly shocking, truly offensive, truly ugly, but not true threats,” and said he should be acquitted of all charges.The day the emails were sent, Breyer had ruled President Donald Trump’s deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and Marines in Southern California was illegal and issued an injunction barring their deployment.Breyer renewed his findings a few months later, blocking the federal government from deploying the state’s National Guard in Los Angeles and ordering the Guard members to be returned to the control of California Governor Gavin Newsom.Reichmuth said Pokorny had a long, vitriolic history of sending inflammatory emails to officials, media outlets such as Time magazine and the New York Times and various politicians on whatever was the top news of the day and was not choosy in his targets to the point of the emails reading as “formulaic.”He said that within a 30-day window of sending the emails about Breyer, Pokorny also sent emails targeting “CIA officers, Kanye West, traitors, Catholics, Democrats, rock stars, DJs, clerks, managers, janitors, the Pope, Ukrainian Nazis, the U.S. armed forces, the mayor of Chicago, and let’s not forget the freemasons.”Last September, Pokorny also sent threatening emails to Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee. The first email was a racist screed against Black people, followed by another email stating, “You are a psychopath, and I’m going to torture and murder you,” according to Alameda County officials.While Reichmuth listed off the many groups of people Pokorny had written “shocking and ugly” emails about, the suspect sat in courtroom expressionless, wearing a dark, plaid cardigan and wire-frame glasses.Reichmuth argued that Pokorny’s threats about skinning Breyer shouldn’t be taken as true threats because when he wrote them — in a hotel room in Encinitas, California — he was hundreds of miles away from Breyer’s courtroom in San Francisco, didn’t have access to a car and had no weapons in his possession.After opening statements, presiding U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, a Barack Obama appointee, instructed the jury that the government doesn’t have to prove that the Pokorny intended to carry out the threat for it to supersede the protections of First Amendment free-speech rights.The government’s first witness, U.S. Deputy Marshall Tekay Dorsey, testified to being forwarded Pokorny’s emails from district clerk Mark Busby.Dorsey, a supervisor for judicial security officers in the Northern District of California federal courts, said he considered the emails “escalating” by the language and specificity and started a “full threat case” investigation on Sept. 2, to find out who sent the emails and ensure Breyer’s safety.Dorsey called the emails “very disturbing” and “very concerning.”“Physical harm to my judge, and that’s how I conceived it,” Dorsey said.Under cross-examination, Dorsey testified about some of the other correspondence Breyer received after his National Guard ruling not by Pokorny, including a handwritten letter to Breyer’s courtroom saying he should be “hanged for treason.”Dorsey said that because of the high-profile nature of the National Guard case, it was expected for Breyer to have extra security during that time.“Would it be safe to say that he got a lot of hate mail?” Pokorny’s public defender Elisse Larouche asked. Dorsey agreed.Witness testimony continues Wednesday.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads