With a Friday deadline looming for prosecutors and defense attorneys to provide an update on the case against the man charged with trying to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the case is at the forefront of a larger national escalation of threats against judges.

It’s been almost two years since Nicholas John Roske, then-26, was charged with attempting to murder Justice Kavanaugh. No trial date has been set yet and the latest court filing notes that discussions about a “pretrial resolution are ongoing” — indicating a plea deal may be in the works. 

Mr. Roske initially pleaded not guilty to the charges. The Justice Department says that when Mr. Roske traveled from California to Maryland aiming to “kill a specific Supreme Court justice,” law enforcement found in his possession items including a pistol, tactical chest rig, tactical knife, zip ties, tools, and a crow bar. He allegedly told detectives he was angry about the leak of the draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. 

“Roske stated that he began thinking about how to give his life a purpose and decided that he would kill the Supreme Court justice after finding the justice’s Montgomery County address on the internet,” an FBI special agent, Ian Montijo, said in an affidavit.

Mr. Roske’s lawyer did not return a request for comment from the Sun ahead of this week’s update. The Justice Department declined to comment.

The pending case — as well as other protests outside justices’ homes in the summer of 2022 — has prompted calls from the court to Congress for $19 million to beef up security for the justices, as the Sun recently noted in an editorial. 

Intimidation tactics against the high court have been escalating in recent years. In 2020, Senator Schumer, standing outside the Supreme Court and talking to a pro-abortion crowd, threatened two of the justices. 

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” he said. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” The comments were rebuked by Chief Justice John Roberts as “not only inappropriate” but “dangerous.”

Reflecting last year on the outcry after the Dobbs decision, Justice Samuel Alito said that several justices had become “targets of assassination.” 

“It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Justice Alito added that he is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.” 

Leftists have increasingly been attacking the “legitimacy” of the court, he said, adding that this “type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices” is “new during my lifetime.” And as the justices are “hammered daily,” he said “practically nobody” had stepped up to defend them. 

It’s an issue that extends beyond the Supreme Court. One federal judge, Esther Salas, has pushed for legislation in recent years to protect judges from the “great danger” the job can bring with it. Her 20-year-old son was murdered after a man — who was upset about how she handled a case — tracked the family’s address down and shot him. It’s one of several cases in the past several decades where a federal judge or their family members have been murdered in their houses. 

The federal Judiciary has noted that “there has been a sharp rise in threat and inappropriate communications against federal judges and other essential court personnel” — in 2015 there were 926 incidents and that number surged to 4,261 in 2020, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.