April 2 (UPI) — The California man who planned to kill U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 will plead guilty in the incident, his lawyers said Wednesday.
Nicholas John Roske, now 29, of Simi Valley, was originally scheduled to go on trial in June.
On Wednesday, lawyers for Roske wrote in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Boardman. In it, they said the matter had been talked over with federal prosecutors and offered next Monday for the guilty plea hearing to the single charge.
“We write to inform the Court that Mr. Roske wishes to plead guilty to the one-count Indictment pending against him,” they said in part.
Prosecutors say that Roske, then 26, traveled from his native California to Maryland with the intent to assassinate Kavanaugh.
He was charged for the attempted crime by a federal grand jury in June 2022.
According to the indictment, he was carrying a firearm, two bullet magazines, 17 rounds of ammunition in a plastic bag, a speed loader and other firearm-related items.
Police said that he called 911 on himself after speaking to his sister and was later captured near Kavanaugh’s home after he took a taxi.
He later told authorities he did so because he was “upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to abortion, as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.”
Roske indicated he had “been suicidal for a long time.”
He was, his attorney’s wrote in a court filing, “acutely suicidal, visibly exhausted and had repeatedly expressed his need for psychiatric care.”
“And when I saw that the leaked draft, it made me upset and then it made me want to — I don’t know,” he said, adding that he “was under the delusion that I could make the world a better place by killing him.”
The attempted assassination charge, meanwhile, carries a sentence of up to life in prison.
