Officers recover a handgun from Nicholas Roske’s luggage in a 2022 video still from body-worn cameras. ( U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland)
The California man accused of plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh intends to plead guilty, his attorneys said in a letter to a federal judge filed in court Wednesday morning.
Nicholas Roske, 29, will admit to planning to assassinate a justice of the United States, according to the letter. Roske was scheduled to be tried in the case in June in U.S. District Court in Maryland.
Authorities said that Roske flew from California in June 2022, took a cab to Kavanaugh’s neighborhood in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and got out on the darkened streets with a suitcase that held burglary tools and a handgun. He saw the justice’s security detail, turned and walked away, eventually speaking on the phone with his sister, who persuaded him to call 911 and turn himself in.
Roske did so, according to court filings, and was taken into custody near Kavanaugh’s home around 2 a.m. by Montgomery County Police Department officers. He then spoke with Montgomery detectives and FBI agents and acknowledged why he came to Maryland, officials said.
“What was your plan?” a Montgomery detective asked.
“Break in,” Roske replied. “Shoot him and then shoot myself.”
Roske also told investigators he had grown concerned over the court’s rightward shift on abortion and other issues and that he was searching for purpose. He said he had prepared for the attack for a month.
“I was under the delusion,” Roske said, “that I could make the world a better place by killing him.”
Roske’s attorneys have said he was not thinking clearly. “At the time, Mr. Roske was acutely suicidal, visibly exhausted, and had repeatedly expressed his need for psychiatric care,” his lawyers, Assistant Federal Public Defenders Andrew Szekely and Ellie Marranzini, wrote in earlier court filings.
Earlier this year, the attorneys had asked the court to toss out the statements made by Roske, arguing that at the time he didn’t comprehend that he was relinquishing his rights not to speak to the investigators and giving up his rights to consult an attorney. Prosecutors denied the claims, and a hearing on the matter was scheduled for next week, according to court filings.
Roske’s trial could have turned on what “substantial steps” he took to carry out his plan, according to experts on federal criminal law, who said that prosecutors could have argued that taking a cross-country flight with gun in a suitcase, for example, constituted a substantial step.
The count to which Roske intends to plead guilty carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. But in its announcement of Roske’s indictment in 2022, the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland noted that sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum.
