The defendant who pleaded guilty in the 2022 plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as transgender, according to court records reviewed by Newsweek, which note that counsel will refer to Nicholas Roske as Sophie or “Ms. Roske,” and use “female pronouns.”
Newsweek has reached out to Roske’s attorney for comment via email on Saturday.
Why It Matters
In April, Roske pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate the conservative justice in June 2022. Roske, who was 26 at the time, was arrested near Kavanaugh’s residence in Chevy Chase, Maryland, armed with a gun and a knife and carryingzip ties, authorities said.
Debates over political violence, mass shootings, and ties to transgender suspected shooters has intensified in recent weeks, following the September 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University (UVU) and a late-August mass shooting at a Catholic church in Minneapolis.
Kirk was shot and killed while speaking about transgender shooters. Utah Governor Spencer Cox has said the suspect in custody, Tyler Robinson, was in a romantic relationship with his roommate, “a male transitioning to female.” Robin Westman, who was transgender, shot and killed two children and injured many others at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis during Mass last month.
Gun violence experts note transgender shooters make up a small fraction of cases.
What To Know
In a September 19 memorandum filed ahead of Roske’s October 3 sentencing, her legal team noted in a footnote that while the case is captioned United States v. Nicholas John Roske, “that name remains Ms. Roske’s legal name, and she has not asked to recaption the case. Out of respect for Ms. Roske, the balance of this pleading and counsel’s in-court argument will refer to her as Sophie and use female pronouns.”
The filing, which notes that Roske filed a guilty plea and has remarked on the “seriousness” of the offense, states that the sentencing should be mitigated by several factors including “the harshness of the conditions of confinement Ms. Roske will face due to current Bureau of Prisons polices regarding transgender inmates and the lack of adequate mental health resources in the Bureau of Prisons.”
The court documents noted that “in 2020, Sophie came out to herself as a trans woman and sought medical care.” Details on the matter were not made public, but the filing also stated that Roske “came out to her sister and closest friends as trans between late 2020 and early 2021. At the time, Sophie was certain that her parents would not have accepted her gender identity.”
In the government’s September 19 sentencing filing, the prosecution noted that at one-point Roske was targeting three “sitting judges of the United States Supreme Court,” adding that “the defendant’s explicit objective was to single-handedly alter the Constitutional order for ideological ends.”
Roske’s attempted assassination of Kavanaugh took place just weeks ahead of the Court’s decision to overturn the landmark abortion rights case, Roe v. Wade. A memo had been leaked on the matter, showing that a majority of justices were poised to strike it down.
What People Are Saying
Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday: “This attempt against the life of a Supreme Court Justice was an attack on the entire judicial system that cannot go unpunished. This Department of Justice condemns political violence and our prosecutors will ensure that this disturbed individual faces severe consequences for his deranged actions.”
Fox News host Jesse Watters said in a Friday segment: “Filings show that Roske actually used female pronouns before trying to kill Kavanaugh. So here we have more trans terrorism. Sophie faces 30 years in prison and has already pled guilty.”
Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, told Newsweek in August following the Annunciation Catholic School shooting: “Mass public shootings, like what happened yesterday in Minneapolis, are exceedingly rare (less than 0.5 percent of all crimes that occur annually). Mass public shootings by individuals identifying as transgender are a mere fraction (likely an even smaller percentage of incidents). Therefore, the fact that yesterday’s perpetrator identified as transgender is exceedingly rare.”
What Happens Next?
On Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland issued a sentencing memo, requesting a 30-year sentence for Roske “followed by lifetime supervised release.” The defense, however, recommended a “sentence of 96 months’ incarceration followed by a 25-year supervised release term.”
Roske will be sentenced on October 3.