Left: Ryan Routh (Law&Crime). Center: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida). Right: President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at a meeting of the House GOP conference, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
The North Carolina man who tried to kill President Donald Trump at one of his golf courses in Florida appealed his criminal conviction and sentence to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit this week.
In a 149-page appellate brief, counsel for Ryan Routh, 60, argued across 14 different topics — and many more subtopics — for why the would-be assassin should have some of his counts dismissed entirely and be granted a new trial on the remainder of his convictions.
And, in service of a new trial, Routh wants a new judge as well, inveighing at length against U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who oversaw the relatively quick criminal case.
Routh was arrested in June 2025 and convicted that same September on counts of attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate, assaulting a federal officer and multiple firearm violations in connection with the assassination plot.
In February of this year, Routh was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, plus seven years for one of the gun charges.
Throughout the pretrial process, the defendant made a series of requests denied by Cannon — including to have Trump himself testify. One denied request included a bid for discovery deemed "classified."
That secondary request forms part of the defense's argument.
"The district court erred in granting the government's motion under [classified procedure law] to withhold potentially discoverable information from the defense," the appellate brief reads.
To hear Routh's attorney tell it, Cannon used the wrong set of legal considerations when ruling on the discovery request.
"In allowing the government to withhold discovery, the district court erred in failing to consider whether the information would be helpful to the defense," the brief continues. "Instead, the court granted the motion based only on findings that the government made a sufficient showing that the information was classified and that its disclosure could cause serious damage or exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States."
The contours of that material, however, are still under wraps.
Routh suggests the appeals court could find that Cannon "should have ordered the government to provide a summary or substitute instead of allowing it to withhold the information altogether."
This aspect of the defendant's discovery analysis dovetails with a similarly denied recusal request. That is, Routh argues the overall secretive nature of how the discovery request was decided is a mark against Cannon in terms of how she ran the case overall.
From the appellate brief, at length:
Scrutinizing even the appearance of impartiality is particularly important here where part of the proceedings were held ex parte. Here, the court heard government ex parte filings under [classified procedure law], held ex parte hearings, and ultimately granted the government's motion to withhold information from the defense. The doctrine of erring on the side of recusal should have even more weight in cases like this one where the case involves ex parte proceedings that determined whether the defendant has access to discoverable information that may be helpful to his defense.
"For these reasons, the motion to recuse should have been granted," the brief goes on.
Other bases for recusal included what Routh termed Cannon's "relationships to Trump" and one prosecutor on the case, with whom the judge went to high school and whose wedding she attended.
"She was appointed by the alleged victim," the brief continues. "[She had] presided over other cases involving him in this district in which she had ruled in his favor and was later reversed by this Court; was publicly praised by Trump for her rulings in his cases; and media was already questioning her impartiality and whether the cases were indeed randomly assigned. Recusal was required."
The brief further argues that the district court again got the law wrong when ruling on the initial recusal request.
"She also erred by denying the motion in part on her own findings that she was not actually biased when actual bias is irrelevant," the brief argues.