A man accused of trying to assassinate United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over the court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade will plead guilty.
According to a document filed in the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Maryland, Northern Division, Nicholas Roshe intends to enter a plea of guilty to one count of attempting to assassinate a U.S. justice.
The maximum sentence for the guilty plea is life imprisonment, a $250,000 fine and supervised release for life. Roske will also pay a $100 special assessment, with the court possibly ordering restitution.
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A hearing for Roske to officially plead guilty will be held either April 8 or 9, The Associated Press reported.
In June 2022, shortly before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a then 26-year-old Roske traveled from California to Maryland with the intention of killing Kavanaugh and then himself.
According to court documents, Roske was angered by the leaked draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson opinion, in which Kavanaugh joined the majority that supported overturning Roe.
A transcript of comments made by Roske to a special agent shortly after his arrest that was released in January noted that he said, “I’ve been suicidal for a long time.”
“When I saw that … leaked draft, it made me upset and then it made me want to — I don’t know. I was under the — I was under the delusion that I could make the world a better place by killing him,” Roske stated, according to the transcript.
Roske had initially attempted to have the transcript of his comments declared inadmissible, and argued that he had been unconstitutionally searched by authorities when arrested.
“While federal agents advised Mr. Roske of his rights and obtained his signature on a rights-waiver form, this waiver was not made voluntarily and intelligently,” stated the motion. “At the time, Mr. Roske was acutely suicidal, visibly exhausted, and had repeatedly expressed his need for psychiatric care.”
The incident was one of a wave of threats and acts of physical violence against pro-life individuals, advocacy groups, charities and churches in 2022 due to the overturning of Roe.
Read: List: Churches, pro-life offices torched, vandalized by abortion activists since Supreme Court leak
In October 2022, Justice Samuel Alito said at an event hosted by the conservative, Washington D.C.-based think-tank The Heritage Foundation that the draft leak made members of the high court “targets for assassination.”
“The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe and [Planned Parenthood v. Casey] targets for assassination, because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us,” Alito said at the time.
Alito added that everyone, from the justices to their staff, just “want things to get back to normal the way they were before all this last term.”
