(CN) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear R.Kelly’s case on appeal from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, potentially bringing an end to the former R&B singer’s yearslong legal fight against his 2022 federal conviction in Chicago.
The high court did not give any reason for turning down Kelly’s appeal, providing the Seventh Circuit with only a single-page order alerting it to the denial.
A federal jury in Chicago convicted Kelly in September 2022 on six child porn and underage sexual enticement charges — three for producing sex tapes between 1998 and 1999 with his goddaughter, a then-14 year old girl going by the pseudonym Jane, and three for enticing sex with Jane and two other women going by the pseudonyms Nia and Pauline.
Kelly told the Supreme Court this past July that the basis of his conviction was based on an unconstitutional amendment to federal sex offense law. It’s a claim he also unsuccessfully made to the Seventh Circuit, and now-deceased U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber before that.
The disgraced singer argued that he should never have faced trial over his sexual encounters with underage girls because the statute of limitations for prosecuting those encounters expired when the youngest of the girls turned 25 in 2009.
Though Kelly faced multiple state-level child porn charges in 2002 — of which he was acquitted in 2008 — he wasn’t federally indicted in Chicago until 2019. Congress amended the relevant underage sex offense statute of limitations in 2003 and 2006 to last for the entire life of the victim, but Kelly argued that the change couldn’t apply to him retroactively without violating his due process rights.
“Consistent with the well-established presumption against retroactive legislation, the 2003 amendment is inapplicable to the charged conduct as is any subsequent amendments to [the minor sex offense law],” Kelly argued in his petition to the Supreme Court, citing prior relevant cases. “It is axiomatic that ‘criminal limitations statutes are ‘to be liberally interpreted in favor of repose.’ This court has explained that the aversion to retroactive rulemaking is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence and embodies a legal doctrine centuries older than our republic.”
Kelly also challenged the sentence Leinenweber, a Ronald Reagan appointee, handed down in February 2023 on the same grounds. Leinenweber sentenced Kelly to 20 years in prison for his Chicago conviction, 19 of them to be served concurrently with a 30-year sentence he received for a September 2021 federal sex trafficking conviction in New York City.
Based on his statute of limitations argument, Kelly told the Supreme Court this sentence was “improper both procedurally and substantively.”
The Supreme Court apparently did not find his arguments convincing, and neither did any of the lower courts. Leinenweber denied the singer’s dismissal motion based on the statute of limitations argument two months before his Chicago criminal trial began in August 2022.
Leinenweber wrote that the minor sex offense law could still apply to Kelly because Congress amended it before the original limitations period had expired. Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean made the claim again before a Seventh Circuit panel during oral arguments in February; the appellate judges hearing the case affirmed Leinenweber’s judgment on the issue in April.
“The law does not support Kelly’s position,” U.S. Circuit Judge Amy St. Eve, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote for the court’s unanimous opinion. “As a threshold matter, it is not unconstitutional to apply a newer statute of limitations to old conduct when the defendant was subject to prosecution at the time of the change, as Kelly was in 2003. Similarly situated defendants have argued the Constitution’s prohibition on retroactive punishment bars this sort of change — without success.”
At 57 years old, Kelly has argued in several court filings that he is likely to die in prison should his convictions and sentences stand. But St. Eve noted in April that the Chicago jurors acquitted Kelly on seven other charges in 2022, calling their decision “even-handed” when weighed against his crimes.
“No statute of limitations saves him, and the resulting sentence was procedurally proper and — especially under these appalling circumstances — substantively fair,” she wrote.