The person who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court in 2022 will be sentenced on Friday morning at a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md.
Prosecutors have asked that Sophie Roske be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison for attempting “to commit preplanned, coldblooded murder” and to “change through violence” the workings of the judiciary.
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.
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, duct tape, pepper spray, lock picks, a crowbar and other 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.
She also said she was worried about the possibility that the court would make it easier to obtain firearms. 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. She bought a Glock 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and practiced firing it at a range.
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The post As Political Violence Rises, Justice Kavanaugh’s Would-Be Assassin to Be Sentenced appeared first on New York Times.
