R. Kelly’s legal team has filed an appeal in the US Supreme Court requesting to have his federal child pornography conviction overturned. In their petition, the attorneys argue his child sex crime charges fall outside of the statute of limitations.
The petition for writ of certiorari is based on the 2003 PROTECT Act, which eliminated the federal statute of limitations for child pornography. In the appeal, the defense argues that since the singer’s convicted acts date back to the 1990s, the statute of limitations would have expired.
“Defendant’s charges were time barred,” the court document reads (via Rolling Stone). “Because Congress did not expressly state that the PROTECT Act should apply retroactivity and even rejected a version of the bill that included a retroactive provision, the PROTECT Act did not extend the statute of limitations and Defendant was convicted of time-barred offenses.”
Kelly was found guilty on three counts of child pornography production and three counts of child sex trafficking through coercion and enticement in Chicago on September 14th, 2022, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A central piece of evidence in the trial was a video that depicted Kelly allegedly raping his then-14-year-old goddaughter “Jane.” The appeal claims that the statute of limitations period only extended to 2009, when “Jane” had turned 25 years old.
“Defendant was not charged until more than a decade after the expiration of the statute of limitations under the applicable law at the time of the alleged conduct,” Kelly’s lawyers wrote in the Supreme Court petition.
Earlier this year, a federal appellate court in Chicago rejected Kelly’s statute of limitations argument and upheld his conviction. Kelly is concurrently serving his prison time for this conviction with a 30-year sentence he received following a separate conviction in New York federal court.
