Sophie Roske was sentenced to just over eight years — 97 months — in prison on Friday for a 2022 attempt to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court.
The sentence was handed down by Judge Deborah L. Boardman, of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland, at the end of a daylong hearing at a courthouse in Greenbelt, Md.
Ms. Roske, 29, was charged under her legal name, Nicholas J. Roske. In September, her attorneys disclosed to the court that she is transgender and now uses the name Sophie.
“Violence is never a means to a political end in a democratic society,” said Judge Boardman, before delivering the sentence. “We cannot and will not tolerate it.”
Prosecutors asked Judge Boardman to sentence Ms. Roske to at least 30 years in prison for attempting to commit an act of political violence, what one called at the hearing “a very real threat to our system of government, to our Constitution.”
“No judge or public official should live under the fear of thinking that at any moment, at any given day, at any given time, that they could be killed in cold blood, simply for doing their job,” said Coreen Mao, an assistant U.S. attorney.
Judge Boardman’s explanation of her sentence restated some of the arguments made by Ms. Roske’s attorneys, who said that a lesser sentence was warranted because Ms. Roske, who had no prior criminal history, had abandoned her plan at the final moment, surrendered to authorities, told them about the plot and was genuinely remorseful.
“She had had a reality check and reconnected with her own humanity,” said Ellie Marranzini, a federal public defender who represented Ms. Roske at the proceeding.
The judge also said that a lower sentence was warranted because of an executive order issued by President Trump mandating that transgender women be held at male-only federal facilities, which she said could interfere with her continuing to receive gender transition care. Judge Boardman also sentenced Ms. Roske to supervised release, after her prison sentence is complete, for the rest of her life.
Ms. Roske, wearing yellow prison scrubs and ankle shackles, apologized to Justice Kavanaugh and to the judiciary as a whole “for contributing to the fear judges experience as a result of doing their jobs.” She spoke in a halting voice, fighting back tears and leaning on her counsels’ table. Sitting behind her in the gallery were her parents and younger sister. On the other side of the gallery was Justice Kavanaugh’s mother, Martha G. Kavanaugh, who served as a Maryland state prosecutor and judge.
The facts of the case, as revealed by court filings, show an incident that presaged growing concerns about politically motivated violence in America, particularly partisan threats against judges. On June 7, 2022, Ms. Roske flew from California to Virginia and then took a taxi to Justice Kavanaugh’s neighborhood in Maryland, having found his home address online. She was carrying a pistol, zip ties, pepper spray, and burglary tools.
Her plan, she later told the police, was to break into Justice Kavanaugh’s home, kill him and then kill herself. She said she was angry about one of the Supreme Court’s most consequential cases — a leaked draft of an opinion that showed the justices were preparing to end a constitutional right to abortion.
Over the previous few weeks, she had searched online for methods of killing, at one point telling another user on Discord, a messaging platform, that she was “shooting for three” justices, in order to “change the votes for decades to come,” according to prosecutors.
Ms. Roske’s plot against Justice Kavanaugh coincided with an ongoing rise in threats against judges and political leaders. That same year, a Wisconsin state court judge was murdered and the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked, both in their own homes. Since then, high-profile attacks on political leaders have continued, with the killing of two Minnesota state lawmakers, the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and two attempts to assassinate Mr. Trump during the 2024 campaign.
According to statistics compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service, the number of judges threatened each year more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, a trend that has accelerated since President Trump’s return to office.The leaked draft opinion “made me upset,” Ms. Roske told investigators. “I was under the delusion that I could make the world a better place by killing him.”
But in the early hours of June 8, after getting out of the taxi, she received a phone call from her sister. Rather than approach the justice’s house, near which she had noticed a protective detail of U.S. marshals, Ms. Roske dialed 911 and turned herself in.
On Friday, the prosecution argued that it was the presence of law enforcement, and not the phone call, that caused Ms. Roske to not follow through with her lengthy preparations for the killing. The defense claimed that Ms. Roske had changed her mind before leaving the taxi.
Judge Boardman found that while the presence of the marshals may have “moved the needle” for Ms. Roske, she rejected the government’s argument that it was the sole factor in her decision to call 911, which she said was “remarkable,” “extraordinary” and largely driven by the call from her sister.
Since 2022, the path that led Ms. Roske to the brink of an assassination attempt has become more familiar. In an interview, Colin P. Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a nonprofit focused on security issues, said her case appears to be an example both of how the internet can serve as an accelerant to radicalization and how political violence can come from the far left as well as the far right.
“Many of these lone actors have a real sense of grievance,” he said. “They don’t see the government as an entity that is able to help them. In many cases, they see it as the root of the problem. So there’s this proclivity to take matters into their own hands.”
According to filings by her lawyers and by prosecutors, Ms. Roske was a high achiever in high school — an honors student and Eagle Scout — who struggled with her mental health as a young adult, especially during the isolating years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
During that time, she struggled with depression as she tried and failed to live on her own. She had trouble opening up to what she described in a letter to the court as “conservative Christian parents” about her transitioning gender identity and instead sought community with friends and strangers online. “What I see now is that we should have listened more,” her mother, Colleen Roske, told the court on Friday. “She was frustrated with what was going on in the world, and we weren’t really a safe place for her to process that.”
Two months before flying to Virginia, prosecutors say, Ms. Roske asked other Reddit users which person’s death would have the biggest impact on the world.
Justice Kavanaugh has never commented publicly on Ms. Roske or the 2022 incident. According to prosecutors, the attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life led to at least one other threat, “a letter invoking Roske’s name and referencing a gunshot to the associate justice’s head.”
In a September statement, Attorney General Pam Bondi called Ms. Roske a “disturbed individual.” She called Ms. Roske’s actions “an attack on the entire judicial system that cannot go unpunished.”
The 2022 case is a reminder that threats and violence “impact us all,” regardless of political leanings, according to Judge Esther Salas of the District of New Jersey, whose son Daniel Anderl was shot and killed at the entrance of her home in 2020. “I think Governor Cox of Utah said it best,” she said, quoting the Republican governor following the killing of Charlie Kirk. “We have to learn to disagree better.”
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