The man convicted of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign is now challenging both his conviction and his life sentence. Attorney Martin Roth filed a notice of appeal Friday with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of Ryan Routh, following a final judgment entered February 4.
Routh was found guilty on all five counts — including the attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate. Judge Aileen Cannon imposed the maximum: life in prison.
Now Routh wants a do-over.
The facts of the case are not in dispute. Prosecutors said Routh spent weeks planning the attack, ultimately positioning himself near the sixth hole of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, with a rifle placed through vegetation along the course perimeter. According to Newmax, He was spotted before Trump came into view. A Secret Service agent fired in his direction. Routh fled and was later arrested on a nearby highway.
Prosecutors described the plot in blunt terms, writing in court filings that Routh sought to kill Trump:
Cravenly, in cold blood.
The government's sentencing filing made the constitutional stakes explicit:
The Constitution affords citizens many peaceful avenues to oppose or express strong dissent about a Presidential candidate — murder is not one of them.
That line shouldn't need to be written. The fact that it did tells you something about the moment we're living in.
Routh dismissed his public defenders and chose to represent himself at trial. The jury convicted him on all five counts. He then tried to stab himself with a pen after the verdict was announced.
His appeal now rests, in part, on the argument that his self-representation produced an unfair outcome. Routh claimed his "inability to effectively confront witnesses, use exhibits or affirmatively introduce impeachment evidence" affected the trial's result. Roth, the attorney who assisted Routh at sentencing and filed the appeal, identified Routh's decision to act as his own attorney as a ground of potential error for the appeals court to review.
There's a certain irony in a man who insisted on firing his lawyers now complaining that he didn't have adequate legal representation. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to counsel. It also guarantees the right to refuse it. Routh exercised both — in sequence — and now wants the appellate court to treat the second choice as grounds for reversal.
Roth also flagged Judge Cannon's refusal to recuse herself, noting that she was appointed to the bench by Trump. Additionally, the appeal challenges the court's finding that Routh's offense constituted an act of terrorism.
Routh had requested a 27-year sentence. His attorney argued that a reduced sentence would still keep him incarcerated into his 80s and allow access to correctional and mental health treatment. The Department of Justice sought — and got — life.
This was not an isolated event. The September 2024 attempt at Trump's golf club came roughly two months after a separate assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the assailant was shot and killed by a Secret Service counter sniper. Two assassination attempts against a presidential candidate in a single campaign season — and Trump won the election two months after the second one.
The political class spent years treating the rhetoric around Trump as an abstraction — heated words, sharp tweets, cable news panels debating whether the temperature was "too high." Then a man with a rifle sat in the bushes near a golf course and waited. The temperature was never abstract. It was always headed somewhere.
None of that excuses Routh or mitigates what he did. It does, however, frame the appeal for what it is: a convicted would-be assassin searching for procedural footholds after the facts left him nowhere to stand. He planned the attack for weeks. He brought a rifle. He positioned himself along Trump's path. The jury heard all of it and returned a guilty verdict on every count.
The 11th Circuit will now decide whether any of the claimed errors — self-representation, the terrorism finding, the recusal question — warrant a second look. Appeals courts exist for a reason, and Routh has the legal right to file one.
But the facts of this case are heavy, and procedural arguments are thin shelter against them.
