Judge Faces Backlash in Sentence of Would-Be Kavanaugh Assassin

A federal judge’s sentence of just over eight years for the would-be killer of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is teed up to be scrutinized by a federal appeals court as critics contend the punishment was too light.

US District Judge Deborah Boardman of the US District of Maryland appeared prepared for a potential appeal in conducting an hours-long sentencing hearing in Greenbelt on Oct. 3. She went into great detail as she weighed each of the factors she needed to consider in sentencing Sophie Roske, charged as Nicholas John Roske.

The pushback was swift. Attorney General Pam Bondi promised the Justice Department would appeal the “woefully insufficient” sentence. The sentencing guidelines, bolstered by a terrorism enhancement invoked by the government, set the sentence’s range at 30 years to life.

Bondi reiterated the promise to appeal during a Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, in response to questioning by Sen. Ted Cruz. The Texas Republican said he thinks Boardman should be impeached.

Roske was arrested near Kavanaugh’s Maryland home in 2022 after the leak of a draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion. During sentencing, Boardman gave Roske credit for having called police after deciding not to carry out the crime, saying that otherwise authorities may have never known about the plot.

Conservatives have seized on questions that Boardman asked about treatment options for Roske in a male federal penitentiary, as she’s a transgender woman.

The sentence also comes amid a rise in threats to federal judges, with some critics saying the light punishment doesn’t send a strong message.

Rachael Wyrick, a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, said during a Federalist Society webinar Wednesday that the “entire crime was born out of a lack of respect of the rule of law at a fundamental level.”

“Unless there is a really strong message sent, I’m afraid that this sentence is not going to have the effective deterrence we hoped, and the justice deserves,” said Wyrick, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy, referring to Kavanaugh.

Former US District Judge Paul Grimm, of the same court where Boardman sits, said in an interview that Boardman has plenty of experience with criminal law given her years as a federal defender in the district.

While Bondi and others criticize the sentence, he said, the administration has been harshly criticizing district judges, emboldening others to threaten them.

“If they really wanted to reduce the number of threats against federal judges, then they would not be making those kinds of personal attacks against the judges,” said Grimm, the director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School.

Appeal Arguments

In challenging Boardman’s sentence at the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the government could argue she made a clearly erroneous factual finding in handing down the sentence.

For example, Boardman said she couldn’t credit the government’s claim that Roske saw US marshals sitting outside Kavanaugh’s home and was deterred from carrying out the plot to kill the justice as a result. If the Fourth Circuit said Boardman was wrong, that could be a basis for overturning the sentence.

The circuit could also find Boardman abused her discretion by not properly balancing the sentencing factors, said Jeff Izant, a former Justice Department official and federal prosecutor.

Boardman “is a careful and experienced judge,” Izant, a counsel with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, said in an email.

But he said the government could argue that she gave too much weight to Roske abandoning the plan, “or too little weight to the need for the sentence to deter others from committing similar crimes—especially given the rise in threats to judges, which Chief Justice Roberts has recently discussed, and the importance of an independent judiciary.”

The Fourth Circuit in January vacated a 17-day, time served sentence handed down by US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia. The sentencing guidelines called for Conor Fitzpatrick to be incarcerated for 188 to 235 months, after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic in and fraudulent solicitation of personally identifying information, as well as possession of child sexual abuse material.

The trial judge significantly deviated from the guidelines, as Fitzpatrick was 21 at the time and has autism spectrum disorder. But the appellate judges found the district court “abused its discretion by imposing a substantively unreasonable sentence,” and sent the case back to Brinkema. She resentenced Fitzpatrick to three years.

Longtime Defender

A former longtime federal defender, Boardman was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Maryland bench in 2021. She had previously served on the court as a magistrate judge starting in 2019.

She’s heard a number of challenges to the second Trump administration, as the Maryland federal court has become a hub for those lawsuits.

In August, Boardman paused President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship. Earlier she blocked the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing personal information of US union members at federal agencies.

Boardman’s sentencing is one of many high-profile cases that have flooded the Maryland trial court in the past year.

US District Judge Paula Xinis, who also sits in Greenbelt, has presided over the civil lawsuit from Kilmar Abrego Garcia as he challenged his improper removal to El Salvador.

The Justice Department also sued the entire Maryland district court over a standing order that blocked the immediate deportation of detained persons who filed habeas petitions. A Trump-appointed federal judge dismissed that lawsuit, and his ruling is also being appealed to the Fourth Circuit.