Audio By Carbonatix
Last fall, a federal jury in Fort Pierce found 59-year-old Ryan Routh guilty of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in September of 2024. Routh’s case is notable for many reasons, not least of which is that he’s one of four people charged with attempted assassination since the beginning of the 20th Century.
Routh’s case is also unusual because he chose to dispense with the public defenders assigned to him, instead electing to represent himself through the evidence phase of the trial.
On that count, Routh’s case is the latest example of the inconsistency courts display in deciding whether to allow a criminal defendant to represent himself. Indeed, courts often allow the people most likely to lose a trial to exercise this right while compelling those who might succeed on their own to rely on subpar counsel.
Routh’s Performance Was No Match for Federal Prosecutors
Routh put on a disjointed, distracting defense, marked by statements that were often beyond the scope of the case — proposing a “golf match to the death” between himself and Trump, suggesting that if he lost he should be executed but if he won he should become president, questioning witnesses about topics such as whether they’d ever met skateboard icon Tony Hawk or were willing to travel with Routh to Taiwan to host a music festival — leading to multiple judicial admonishments and corrections in court. After the verdicts were read, Routh tried to stab himself in the neck with a pen.
On October 4, the court received a letter from Routh requesting representation for his sentencing. A week later, the judge appointed counsel.
It’s an understatement that Routh did himself no favors by insisting on representing himself. The judge who allowed it — none other than U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon — was appointed by President Donald Trump, the defendant’s alleged target. Cannon’s rulings in high-profile cases involving the president have resulted in reversals by appellate courts and prompted claims of “favoritism.”
The Right to Self-Representation: A Brief Primer
Any defendant in a criminal case has a constitutional right under the Sixth Amendment to represent themselves. Known as “pro se” representation and codified by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1975 decision in Faretta v. California, this allows a defendant to waive the right to legal counsel and conduct their own defense at trial, provided the waiver is made knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently. The court will typically conduct an inquiry to ensure the defendant understands the risks and disadvantages of self-representation before allowing it.
In practice, that standard — knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently — is light on knowledge or intelligence and heavy on the voluntariness. While judges often consider factors such as the defendant’s age, education, mental capacity, and the seriousness of the charges when deciding whether they can waive their right to counsel, the defendant who wants to represent himself isn’t required to know any law or have any specific education in order to forgo a lawyer.
In the end, all it takes to sacrifice the constitutional guarantee of effective assistance of counsel: really wanting to do it and knowing you’ll probably lose.
Some Defendants Represent Themselves and Win
Routh’s situation is far from uncommon. The annual number of pro se criminal defendants in the U.S. is unknown, mostly because courts don’t track this data. But the available data reveal a surprise: Defendants who take on their own defense don’t fare as poorly as one might expect.
Georgetown Law Center professor Erica Hashimoto was the first to study self-representation in earnest. In a paper published in 2007, Hashimoto found that most felony defendants who choose to represent themselves didn’t do so out of mental illness or ignorance. Instead, nearly 80 percent of the pro se defendants whose cases she examined showed no signs of mental illness, and many cited legitimate concerns about ineffective or delayed counsel as their motivation for proceeding pro se.
In fact, Hashimoto’s findings, drawn from state and federal cases from the 1990s and early 2000s, refuted the widely held belief that self-representation is overwhelmingly detrimental to defendants. She found that pro se felony defendants had conviction rates equivalent to or lower than those who were represented by counsel. Her study also undermined the claim that most pro se defendants are mentally ill, finding instead that the majority made a reasoned choice to represent themselves.
In a surprising twist, a 2015 study that followed up on Hashimoto’s analysis found that the number of dismissals — cases thrown out — increased between 1996 and 2011 among self-represented defendants. For those represented by a lawyer, the number of dismissals decreased during the same period.
These statistics continue to play out in real time. In the high-profile “Treehouse Murder” trial in Key West, Ty Tucker exercised his Sixth Amendment right, dropping his attorneys during the trial and representing himself in court. During the deliberations that followed, one juror refused to vote guilty, leading to a mistrial.
And back in 2019 in Philadelphia, Hassan Bennett represented himself after an appeals court overturned his murder conviction owing to ineffective counsel. During the retrial, Bennett pointed to police misconduct and successfully exposed weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. The jury found him not guilty after he’d spent over a decade in prison.
James Traficant, a former Ohio sheriff, acted as his own attorney in a bribery trial — famously referring to himself as “my client” during the proceedings. After he won an acquittal, the community elected him to represent them in Congress, where he served from 1985 until 2022. (That ended when he was tried for bribery again, represented himself again, and lost.)
Judge Cannon Tried to Be Fair to Routh
Cannon took the task of deciding Routh’s bid for self-representation seriously. His hearing — known as a “Faretta canvass” after the aforementioned Supreme Court case that cemented the right to self-representation — was split in two, giving the judge enough time to receive a letter that Routh told her he had mailed to the court a few weeks earlier.
The judge made it clear that she thought it inadvisable for Routh to waive his right to counsel.
“[I]t is my opinion, sir, that it is a bad idea for you…you’re not familiar with the law, and I think your appointed attorneys would do a significantly better job at representing you,” Cannon told the defendant. And she was right.
But she didn’t say that the right to self-representation is not absolute. In 2008, three decades after the Supreme Court established the right, it partially reversed it in Indiana v. Edwards. In that decision, the court made clear that some people may be so mentally ill that they are incapable of knowingly or willingly waiving their Sixth Amendment rights.
And judging from the proceedings during his trial, Routh likely qualified for an exemption under that stipulation. One letter Routh submitted read like a death wish and clearly demonstrated that he didn’t understand court procedures.
“…[W]hy is the death penalty not allowed? At 60, a life of nothingness without love — what is the point[?] Why is it not all or nothing?” he wrote. “I had wished for a prisoner swap with Hamas…so that I could die being of some use and save all this court mess — but no one acts; perhaps you have the power to trade me away. What an easy diplomatic [victory] for Trump to give an American he hates….”
Routh followed that letter with one requesting that he be transferred to a state that allows assisted suicide “since I am a constant failure.”
The question of whether Routh had the capacity to waive his right to counsel may be grounds for appeal and may even serve as a mitigating factor in his sentencing.
That proceeding is currently scheduled for February 4. His new attorney, Boca Raton-based Martin Roth, has already secured funding for an expert psychiatric witness.
Regardless of whether Judge Cannon should have allowed him to conduct the trial on his own, the evidence against Routh was damning. It included DNA evidence, fingerprints, burner phones, browser history, eyewitnesses, and a 12-page manifesto titled “Dear World” that stated “this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.”
In his defense, all that Routh could muster were two character witnesses who hadn’t been in touch with him for years.
Even the most silver-tongued attorney would have struggled to win an acquittal. Had he been compelled to be represented by counsel, the result likely would have been the same.
But shockingly, the strength of the case against a defendant is not a factor in deciding whether to permit him to represent himself. This has created a dilemma that unfolds in criminal courtrooms every day: A judge is empowered to deny a defendant who can win without a lawyer the chance to defend himself, and to permit a defendant who’d make the most unskilled lawyer look like a superstar to drag himself to judicial slaughter.
