The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from R. Kelly over his 2022 convictions on child pornography and enticement charges, leaving him with no further direct appeals from a verdict that saw him sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Kelly’s attorneys had urged the high court to take up the case, in which a federal jury in Chicago convicted him in September 2022, by arguing that the case should have been barred by the statute of limitations.
But in an order Monday, the justices declined to tackle the case. As is typical, the court did not explain its decision to reject Kelly’s case along with dozens of others. The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions per year and only decides to hear a tiny fraction them.
Monday’s order dealt only one of Kelly’s two sets of sex abuse convictions. The other — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by prosecutors in New York that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence — is still pending on appeal before a lower appellate court.
In the current case, a different team of federal prosecutors from Chicago accused Kelly of violating child pornography laws, enticing minors for sex and obstructing justice by upending a 2008 criminal trial.
Though he was acquitted on certain counts, Kelly was convicted in September 2022 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison; the vast majority of that sentence will be served concurrently with the New York sentence. The conviction was affirmed by a lower appeals court earlier this year.
In asking the justices to consider overturning that ruling, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean cited the statute of limitations. She said that an updated federal law extending the time limit, passed in 2003, could not be applied retroactively to Kelly’s alleged crimes, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Retroactive application of the 2003 amendment not only fly in the face of congressional intent,” Bonjean writes. “It violates notions of fundamental fairness.”
Barring an unusual outcome at some point in the future, Monday’s decision effectively finalized Kelly’s convictions and sentencing in the Chicago case. The separate convictions in the New York case could still be overturned, however, either by the lower appeals court or by the Supreme Court.
Kelly’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment.