Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Brett Kavanaugh watches as Taoiseach Micheal Martin speaks at a breakfast meeting hosted by U.S. Vice President JD Vance at his official residence in Washington, D.C., as part of his week-long visit to the U.S. on March 12, 2025 (Press Association via AP Images).
A California resident was sentenced in a Maryland federal court on Friday for a failed assassination attempt on the life of  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
In April, Sophie Roske, 29, accepted a plea deal on a lone felony count of attempting to kidnap or murder, or threatening to assault, kidnap, or murder a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
The crime in question offers a rare form of open-ended punishment. The statute itself notes that someone convicted “shall be punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.”
In exchange for that plea, and for the admissions that preceded it, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, a Joe Biden appointee, sentenced the defendant to 97 months in federal prison – just over eight years and exactly one month more than defense counsel requested in a September sentencing memorandum.
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Notably, the sentence is far below the one proposed by prosecutors in their own sentencing memo filed last month. The Department of Justice asked Boardman to put Roske behind bars for 30 years to life.
“The defendant researched; planned; procured the tools for the planned killings; traveled across the entirety of the country with those tools, including a gun; and attempted to delete online evidence of motive and intent,” the memo reads. “The defendant”s objective — to target and kill judges to seek to alter a court’s ruling — is an abhorrent form of terrorism and strikes at the core of the United States Constitution and our prescribed system of government.”
In fact, federal guidelines suggested a minimum sentence of 30 years for those reasons, prosecutors noted in their filing.
“This is an atypical defendant and an atypical case,” the judge said, according to a courtroom report by Politico. “Though she got far too close to executing her plans, the fact remains she abandoned them. Sophie Roske’s admission of guilt and effort to come clean did not occur after or even because she was caught in the act by police…If she had not called 911, law enforcement would never have known about Sophie Roske and her plot to kill a Supreme Court justice.”
Still, the judge opined that she viewed Roske’s actions as a form of terrorism and said the eight-year sentence accurately reflects the severity of the offense. In addition to the prison term, Roske will be subject to a lifetime of supervised relief, or probation.
“He’s a justice on the Supreme Court but he’s a human being, he’s a public servant and he and his family should never have to face the fear of threat because he does his job,” Boardman said during the sentencing hearing.
Roske, a former substitute teacher from Simi Valley, apparently became radicalized by the leaked landmark Supreme Court decision overturning the long-standing precedent of abortion rights via Roe v. Wade.
Despite being armed with a Glock and other potential weapons, Roske was not driven to actual violence, with a federal criminal complaint outlining how the would-be assassin was intercepted by law enforcement well before any shots were fired.
After Roske was taken into custody and given her Miranda rights, investigators learned she was “upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to abortion as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.”
Prosecutors said in court filings that Roske admittedly “began thinking about” how to obtain purpose in life and eventually settled on killing Kavanaugh “after finding the Justice’s Montgomery County address on the Internet.”
In the notice of intent to plead guilty filed by Roske’s lawyers earlier this year, the defense admitted a number of events the government would be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt if the case were to go to trial. The filing said the defendant traveled from Los Angeles to Dulles International Airport in Virginia on June 7, 2022, “with an unloaded firearm and separately packed ammunition” in checked baggage. The next day after landing, Roske “traveled by taxi from the airport to the Montgomery County, Maryland neighborhood” where Kavanaugh lived, according to the filing.
But once outside the jurist’s home, Roske had a fit of conscience. Immediately walking away from the Kavanaugh household, Roske called 911 to report “having suicidal and homicidal thoughts” and that the venture from the Golden State was “to act on” those same thoughts. Roske went on to tell the dispatcher about the cache of weapons and burglary tools. A similar summary was later provided to law enforcement: Roske wanted to kill Kavanaugh and then commit suicide.
Roske offered an allocution on Friday.
“I sincerely apologize to the justice and his family for the considerable distress I put them through,” the defendant said. “I have been portrayed as a monster, and this tragic mistake I made will follow me for the rest of my life. I also realized how twisted my thinking and sense of self can become when my mental health is at its worst.”
